1. Define content objectives

You need to define the type of visitors you want to attract to each page and its content. It is also important to define the messages you want visitors to read in search engine listings and when they land on the page.  Each page needs to be unique and have a purpose. What do you want to achieve when visitors land on each page. Sign-up, download info, sell product or service, explain your business model etc…

2. Identify relevant keyphrases

Each page needs to have a unique focus and needs to relevant to the overall focus of your website. It is critical to perform a keyword research and analysis before you prepare and write your copy. Each page should target a unique keyword, ideally a search term relevant to the page with high search volumes. Equally each page should be structured so the keyword focus fits into the overall keyword cloud of your website.

Write down the most important phrases, grouping according to the emphasis you are going to place on them.  Think of your website like a pyramid with the most relevant keyphrases at the top (in you homepage) and long tail keyphrases in sub-pages, the lower down the less relevant. Each page should also have its own emphasis:

Primary Keyphrases for which you want to optimise for

Secondary Keyphrases which are part of a keyword group but unlike primary keyphrases they do not feature in the title tags and are slightly less frequent.

Tertiary Keyphrases which might be very long tail keywords are less important but worth listing on the page a few times.

3. Choose keyword rich document name and file location

The page file name and sub directories should contain keyphrases. Both are  shown in the search engine results page (increasing relevance to searchers). Including keywords in both also increases relevance with search engines.

If you can, include your primary keywords in file names and directories. If you use a CMS that creates file names, make sure the file names are created correctly or use URL alias.

4. Define unique, keyword rich title tag

Title tags are important as search engines place strong emphasis on the keyphrases in the page title. Always put the most important keywords at the beginning of the tags. Your brand names to the end. Don’t go over board, make titles no longer than 10 words.

Titles are also shown in the search engine results page and if relevant to searchers titles improve click through rate.

5. Define Meta tags

Google places little or no emphasis on meta tags in determining your site’s ranking position. Other search engines do read them to check the relevance of content, so it is best practice to create unique tags for every page.

The meta description tag is important for your audience since it is often displayed on the search results page and may encourage people to click through. Make sure the description contains page target keywords and is unique for every page.

The description should also have a unique selling point and call-to-action so searchers want to click through to your page. Try to keep to 150 characters.

Keep meta keywords tag simple and only use the keyphrases most relevant to the page you are writing. We recommend 10 – 15 worlds not more.

6. Keyword enrich body copy

The keyphrases frequency in the body copy is considered an important test of relevance by a search engine algorithm.

Copy should be minimum 300 words. Try to repeat each keyphrase 3 times per page (more if content is longer than 300 words) and place most important keywords at least once in the first paragraph.

Aim for a keyword density of 5% but don’t forget keywords in title, tags, Alt tag and links count towards your density. Don’t overdo it in your main body copy.

7. Use Headings

Using heading styles <h1> for headings and <h2> subheadings, etc containing target keyphrases has some positive effects for SEO and also helps with accessibility and scannability of the page.

8. Cross link pages

Cross linking your pages via hyperlinks is the most powerful page markup feature, both from an SEO point-of-view and for conversion. Hyperlinks highlight the calls-to-action to get the visitor to engage with page and site.

Make sure you place hyperlinks in the page body copy with keyphrases in the anchor text.  Think about whether there are other pages on your site for which this page would be relevant for readers and then link to the new page using anchor text containing your target keyphrases.

9. Tag images

Graphical images on each page can have an Alt text associated with them.  Alt text are not seen by page visitors but indexed by search engines and used to determine relevancy. Always cross link images to related pages and use keywords in the Alt text.

10. Keep optimising pages

You need to check your that your copy is effective and modify where necessary.  Regular updates and enhancements are good for SEO and your site visitors. Check your web analytics to review visitors entering site on your page and review your listing positions for different search engines.

Optimising copywriting for SEO is not difficult, but can be time consuming. Optimised copy is the foundation for SEO, it is not optional.

Search Engines in general don’t like duplicate content and strongly dislike repetition and replication.  Copying content from other website has been  common practice amongst website owners. It is a bad practice and can be easily detected by search engines.  The original content publisher gets all the  credited and all duplicate pages and sites get penalised.

Duplicate content is generated accidentially or even carelessly by website owners.  Often as a result of  poor content management or lack of knowledge. Creating pages by just copy & past content with a small change in keyword focus does not make your content unique. Lack of attention when DNS / domain mapping can also lead to duplications.

Google for example can detect exact duplicates and near duplicates all the way from the crawl, through the indexing, through the rank scoring.

Typical scenarios of duplicate content:

1. Identical pages within your site because they contain only minor changes such as keyword replacements.

2. Localised pages within your international sites could be considered identical.

3. Campaign landing pages with minor keyword changes to original pages.

4. Identical page to pages published on other websites.   If the other site has a better PR, your site’s content might be considered duplicate and may be removed from the index.

5. Press releases or other articles containing similar content syndicated across different sites.

Make your pages unique

The best way to let search engines know that your content is unique by making all copy and all the page mark-up factors unique:

• Document / file name
• Meta title
• Meta description
• Meta keywords
• Vary first paragraph copy
• Heading 1
• Heading 2
• Heading 3
• Alt text
• Vary link text to other pages

If you can’t avoid duplicate content (often the case for ecommerce sites), exclude the duplicate pages in your robot.txt file.

If unsure about the uniqueness of your content check your content regularly with copyscape (www.copyscape.com) and see if there is any duplicate content on the web. SEO copywriting is important.