Melbourne Copywriter

It’s common these days for customers to approach search engine consultants and SEO writers for web copy or articles stuffed full of keywords. There seems to be a misconception that this is the essence of search engine optimisation or SEO - a magic wand that’s going to win improved search rankings.

Tempting as it is to accept jobs to produce easy-to-write search engine spam,  this would make me a rather poor search engine consultant. Melbourne, like the rest of the world, is turning up the dial on internet competition. So even if a bunch of articles with an unnaturally high concentration of keywords gives you big a jump in rankings, likely as not, your victory will be short lived. Search engines are getting very smart at spotting this kind of ploy. And when they do, they simply downgrade the offending site.

What do visitors think of your website? Google has a pretty good idea...

Strategic use of keywords is important, but you don’t need tons of them. In fact, you should definitely avoid shovelling as many keywords as you can think of onto a page. It will harm your rankings. Interesting content need only be a few short paragraphs in length to earn you a good ranking. Think quality rather than quantity.

Why? As far as Google is concerned, site age and the number of links to your site from high quality, trusted websites are the most important considerations in getting your ranked.  

Google treats inbound links, or backlinks from other trusted sites as community votes on the quality of your site.

Why would site owners want to link to your website?

Think of it this way – if you own a Melbourne based healthcare website and want to make it as useful to your clients as possible, what sort of external web pages would you link to?  Would you chose sites offering high quality, useful information that can’t be found elsewhere or hard-sell sites promoting  “di$count dr*gs to your door” who are prepared to slip you a few bucks for a sneaky plug? How would the latter choice impact in your reputation?

You need to look at your site through the eyes of potential linkers. What will others gain from linking to you? What can you do to your website to make it so useful that reputable, high ranking sites in related sectors would want to link to you? Of course, the quality of your content is important. But no amount of smoothely written, keyword rich content that says nothing in particular will win you friends in high places. If that's the best you can do - you'll either need to pay hard cash for a link, or provide value in some other way to the site owner to win your backlink.

If you can think of cheap easy ways of providing value to your visitors and you can convince other webmasters to provide you with natural links you don’t need a search engine consultant like. A handful of high class links is all most sites need to give them the edge.

Link building can be a daunting process

Read about some minor changes that you can make to you site that can have a huge impact on your ranking – clear signposting…