Awesome! Powerful SEO Copywriting Secrets

What is SEO Copywriting?

Copywriting in SEO is the art and science of striking a fine balance between content that persuades and content Google can find.
You'll notice you don't rarely see spammy titles and descriptions in Google results anymore. For example, you're way less likely to get a title that says 'Removal Service Boston Removal Service Florida Removal Service' than you are a genuinely compelling and readable title like 'Find the cheapest Boston removal services'.

On one side, there's on-page SEO - the part of SEO that's relevant here: the practice of understanding which signals the Google algorithm uses, and helping it rank your content for the right keywords:

SEO copywriting refers to the art of writing copy that ranks well in search. It is relatively easy to do (if you have some experience), and it’s an excellent way to gain valuable web traffic without spending thousands of dollars on paid advertising.

But it’s not all about rankings and traffic. Writing search engine optimized content is also about engaging readers, building authority, and selling products. After all, what is the point of getting prospects to pages that do not serve a purpose?

To help you please both your readers and the search engines, we’ve compiled a list of 35 of the best SEO copywriting tips for rocking content, all of which are based on actual experience. We have also included a number of resources for writers and marketers.

1. Know Your Audience

Knowing whom you are writing for is one of the best and most important copywriting tips anyone can give you. Your content can never really rank or sell if it doesn’t appeal to a particular audience/consumer. Do your homework. It will pay off.

2. Craft Magnetic Headlines

An irresistible, well-thought-out headline gets your article read (c-r-i-t-i-c-a-l) and sets the tone for your content. It’s also what makes an outstanding first impression. Throw some effective SEO into the mix, and BOOM… your content rocks, rolls, and ranks!

3. Number-Drop for Clicks

Really want people to read your articles? Use numbers in your headlines! Studies show that headlines with numbers (especially odd numbers) get more clicks. It’s psychological; our brains love lists. In addition, they promise something specific and suggest readability.

4. Try Headline Formulas

Save time and still get clicks. Some of the best, most compelling copy titles are just modifications of old SEO copywriting headline formulas, so don’t hesitate to take advantage. Here are 102 good ones that others have used with great success.

5. Use Subheads

A catchy headline reels readers in, but how do you get them to continue reading? Use subheads. Subheadings (header tags – h2, h3, etc.) make your articles ‘skimmable’ and guide readers through the text. They also describe your content to search engines.

6. Choose a Good Font

The right font (and font size) can make your copy easier to read and visually more interesting, increasing engagement. This is why copywriters and blog writers pay so much attention to copy cosmetics. Some fonts are also more ‘web-safe’ than others.

7. Check Your Case

Writing headings and subheadings in Title Case has become the norm, especially in blogging, but it may not suit every blog or purpose. Sentence case may be more suitable in some situations. Whichever case you choose, be sure to use it correctly and consistently.

8. Work in Bolds and Italics

Whether or not using bold and italics is a good SEO content strategy is anyone’s guess, but making certain words and phrases stand out can definitely enhance readability. The more digestible your text is, the more people will read your articles.

9. Write More Content

Does longer content rank better in search? It sure does. Look at these studies by serpiq, seomoz, and quicksprout. Longer posts (1,500 words +) also enable you to provide more value for readers, which helps you establish authority and expertise.

10. Shorten Paragraphs

While longer blog posts and articles generally outperform shorter ones, longer paragraphs do not. Chunky blocks of text just bore and intimidate readers – not what you want. For best results, it is best to keep paragraphs short (2-4 sentences).

11. Don’t Dock Long Tails

Ranking for terms with high search volumes can be tough, especially if your website is new. This is where long-tail keywords come to the rescue. By refining your keywords, you can minimize your competition drastically, as well as boost traffic and conversions.

12. Give Them Answers

Another way to take advantage of the long tail. When people have questions, they type them into Google. That is why Hummingbird came about. When you answer those questions insightfully and credibly as a content writer, your copy ranks, engages, and sells.

13. Power up Your Words

Great copywriters know the importance of using “power words” during content creation – they evoke emotion. Once you hit those emotional chords, you connect with and influence the reader. Additionally, power words tend to compliment keywords nicely.

14. Get Voice Active

Most content writers agree that using passive voice is one of several deadly copywriting sins; it makes your copy wordy and dilutes your message. Active voice, on the other hand, is direct, crisp, and energetic, which makes for persuasive writing.

15. Forget Keyword Density

Keyword density is a tireless SEO myth. While it is important to include strong keywords in your content and not “over-optimize,” there is nothing indicating that search engines favor a particular density. Who wants to read keyword-stuffed mumbo jumbo, anyway?

16. Speak LSI

Rather than focusing on keyword density, you may want to pay more attention to LSI. Using related keywords, synonyms, and grammatical variations not only improves your chances of ranking in the SERPs, but it also prevents redundancy in your copy.

17. Talk Your Reader’s Language

Do you talk like your readers? With blog writing, for example, it is best to adopt a conversational tone, using words and phrases that resonate with the target audience. As your readership grows, search engines will pick up on it, too.

18. Keep It Fresh

Updating your content regularly is important, for search engines and readers. Search engines favor posts that are more recent and relevant because that is what their users want. Your readers and prospects want the same thing – accurate, up-to-date info.

19. Cover Trending Topics

Since we are on the topic of freshness… Covering hot new topics and industry news is an excellent way to get to the top of the SERPs fast. Everybody wants to know the latest and greatest. You could even go the curated content route – but tread carefully.

20. Write Meta Descriptions

A lot of us ignore them because they take time to write. Nevertheless, good SEO copywriting is almost pointless without attention-grabbing Meta descriptions. They directly affect how much traffic a web page receives from a given search result.

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Rules of Good UI Design to Follow On Every Web Designer

It’s pretty easy to find a designer willing to work on any project nowadays. Finding a professional in the area of UI design who is also familiar with best practices, however, is still an uphill battle. If you want to place yourself in contention for these kinds of positions, you’ll need to remain up to date with the latest developments in the field.

Knowing the best practices to follow on every interface design project will put you far ahead of most candidates who simply fire off designs without taking into consideration the variety of details that go into the creation of an interface.

Today, we’ve compiled a list of ten such best practices applicable for UI design in web projects, and to get things started we’re going to talk about the one of UI’s biggest misconceptions.

1. Understand How UI Plays Into UX

Image by karnoff / shutterstock.com

First things first – sometimes these terms are used incorrectly, and while it’s important to understand that while UI does play an important role in UX, the second discipline has a much larger scope.

This is not to say that UI isn’t important, since as we all know, it can make or break a website or app. However, UX designers (or ‘architects’) need to take into consideration such diverse factors as interaction design and architecture, the creation of clear taxonomies, copywriting, coordination with designers and programmers, and so on. It’s the overall design of an entire experience (as the acronym implies), from top to bottom.

In order to create a great interface, UI designers need to rely on information from the user experience angle, such as identifying which problems need to be solved, how the user flow will play out, and determining key product areas and hierarchies. Ideally, serious work on the interface will begin after gaining access to all of this information, then mockups will be made, tested and approved by UX designers and a product will be launched without (too many) hiccups.

2. Know Your Audience

Image by Scott Richardson / shutterstock.com

It should come as no surprise that the most important insights into how to design a fantastic interface should be taken from your users. If you’re in the planning process of launching a website, you must already have an idea of what your future audience will want, but laying out the minutiae is a whole different ballgame.

You need to have a clear picture of what needs will bring people to your website, and exactly how it will go about providing a design that will draw them in further. If you’re a bit lost at this juncture, looking at the competition can be a great way to kickstart the creative process. Which websites are at the top in your project’s field? Are they using similar layouts or colors? Do they adhere to similar styles or seem to cater visually to the same demographics?

Using design patterns that users are comfortable with can help ease them into your website, which you can then differentiate with your own take on their needs.

Once you’ve identified your audience, you can test how your design plays out among them and take their feedback into consideration. Actionable feedback from your desired target audience is incredibly valuable, so get it and use it!

3. Keep Things Simple and Consistent

Image by BoBa22 / shutterstock.com

The hallmark of a great interface is simplicity. By this we don’t mean simply sticking a button or two here and there with some animations thrown in for the hell of it – we mean easy to understand and interact with. Your users shouldn’t need a map in order to navigate through your app or website, and it’s part of your job as an interface designer to subtly guide them from where they are to where they need to go.

MailChimp provides a good example of a simple, clean interface.

In order to do this, you can make use of several elements such as colors, typography, feedback messages, and visual hierarchies, all of which we will cover point-by-point later on.

Interfaces must also be kept consistent throughout a design. This means not re-inventing the wheel on each part of your project, and reinforcing the most important facets of your design at each turn. As they navigate through your designs, users should be made to feel at ease with them progressively, and their immersion shouldn’t be broken due to jarring stylistic choices.

4. Implement a Visual Hierarchy

Image by Rashad Ashurov / shutterstock.com

The most important elements of an interface should be highlighted in order to make users focus on them, and design provides an almost endless array of methods through which to achieve this effect.

The simplest example of this technique that comes to mind would be to make an element bigger in order to turn it into a focal point (which is, incidentally, the same reason no one ignores Godzilla). Take Netflix for example – when opening up its main page you will be hit right away with a few highlighted recommendations which draw your attention by being almost impossible to ignore:

Netflix’s homepage establishes a clear visual hierarchy on its homepage.

Other, more novel ways through which you can implement a visual hierarchy would be by using white space to highlight crucial parts of your interface.

UserApp uses whitespace to highlight the “Try it for free” button.

Alternatively, simply introducing an unexpected element into your design in a tasteful fashion can work wonders. As we’ve said before, consistency in an interface is crucial, to the point where it can border on repetition. When something breaks that visual pattern, your users will sit back and take notice.

5. Make Good Use of Typography

Image by tunejadez / shutterstock.com

Another elegant way to establish a visual hierarchy is through the use of typography. This isn’t as simple as picking a nice font (three out of four designers swear by Comic Sans – give it a try!) and using it throughout your design, though.

For starters, every font has a personality, so to speak, and your picks should be influenced by your audience.

This font, for example, screams “I don’t want to be employed as a designer anymore!”. (Image by Brosko / shutterstock.com)

Size, of course, also plays a key component when using fonts in design. Important information such as headers are highlighted, much like in this very article, and as you may have noticed, throughout the entire design of the Elegant Themes blog (be careful not to highlight too much information, though!).

You can also make use of reverse type to make text stand out, by which we mean making use of contrasting backgrounds to make text pop out. In the example below, contrasting text is used in a menu to highlight which page is being viewed currently (which has the added benefit of simplifying the navigational process for your users).

An example of reverse type in action, on the Smashing Magazine Jobs section.

Some color combinations, such as blue on red, translate terribly to reverse type, but this pitfall should be easy to avoid for any designer worth his salt.

6. Use Color and Contrast Properly

Image by Vlera / shutterstock.com

Picking the right colors for any given design is a science in and of itself. If you’re reading this, chances are you’re already more than passingly familiar with the psychology of colors, and as such, we won’t devote any time to that area at this point.

Instead, we’re going to talk about using colors to their full effect to design a stunning interface. Colors can be used to convey visual hierarchy, establish a relationship between elements, and generally elevate your designs and hold the attention of your users.

When working on an interface, you’ll want to maintain some uniformity as to which colors you’ll be using to convey visual cues, and keep your color scheme to a relative minimum (more colors aint always a good thing).

That said, contrasting colors can be used to great effect in order to draw users attention, as we mentioned in rule number five when discussing reverse type.

A good example of contrasting colors on an interface, taken from the official Jurassic World Spanish website.

A good rule of thumb when choosing which colors to use in your interface is that darker colors tend to carry more visual weight, and these kinds of elements need to be balanced out with lighter colors.

7. Consider Feedback Messages

Image by Biro Emoke / shutterstock.com

Interfaces are meant to be used – that is something that you should never lose sight of during the design process. And one of the biggest advantages of web projects is that you can actually design feedback messages that convey crucial information to your users when they perform an action.

Is something loading? Why not use a simple animation as a feedback message to inform your users that numbers are being crunched in the background? Did someone fill a field incorrectly? Design a message to inform them right away so they know exactly what went wrong.

One of the most popular feedback messages of the web.

In an ideal world, every interface would be intuitive and fast enough that these sort of things wouldn’t happen in the first place. But trust us – users will always find new and innovative ways to break your site. Providing instant feedback as to what’s going on in an intuitive manner is a great way to teach users how your interface is meant to be used.

8. Simplify Your Forms

Image by Anastasia_B / shutterstock.com

Forms are one of the main methods through which users will interact with your web projects. It’s right up there with clicking and, occasionally, cursing their computers because something isn’t working properly.

The problem, however, is that most users hate forms with a burning passion, thanks to any number of reasons. Your task, therefore, is to integrate them into your interface as painlessly as possible to stop your users from cursing out their computers any more than necessary.

You might, for example, begin by asking yourself, “Is this form really necessary?”. In many cases, sign ups are forced upon users for no particular reason, so if you can do away with them and not have to deal with designing an additional interface, it’s a win-win scenario.

In case your project does need users to sign up, why not design the forms to be as simple as possible? Take Twitter, for example. They barely ask for any information, which means users may not have enough time to get angry for having to type in the same information for the umpteenth time.

Twitter, once again providing a nice example with a short and sweet sign up form.

9. Collaborate Your Way to Success

Image by Bakhtiar Zein / shutterstock.com

Depending on the scope of your project, at some point you might find yourself working as part of a team that can shoulder some of the work alongside you, and in such a scenario it’s crucial to make sure that all members of the team share the same information in order to create a usable and appealing interface.

Thankfully, there are a lot of collaboration tools available to help a team stay on track, the best of which are well-covered here. And while we’re talking about developers, you might also want to check out 8 Tips for Collaborating with Developers (A Designer’s Guide).

10. Bring It All Together

Image by Naghiyev / shutterstock.com

Designing an interface is no simple task. You need to take multiple disciplines into consideration as well as arm yourself with technical information regarding your audience, and foresee their needs in order to create a design which will meet and rise above their needs.

Moreover, you need to maintain a close relationship between user experience design and the interface design, since one goes in hand with the other.

However, most of the rules we’ve covered during this article have something in common which will make your life a lot easier: they’re not limited to web design projects. In fact, most of the advice we’ve shared so far should be very familiar to you if you’ve got some design experience (which we bet you do!) – all we’ve done is expand on their relationship with interfaces.

All in all, we’re confident that taking this advice into consideration, you’ll be well on your way to becoming a seasoned interface designer.

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SEO-Friendly Website URL Structure

Some people say there is no such thing as SEO-friendly URL structure. They claim search engines are perfectly capable of making sense of any URL and pretty much any URL structure. In most cases, the people who say this are web developers (just so you know, I love Web devs).

I’ve noticed sometimes web developers and SEOs live in two parallel universes, each with its own center of gravity. While web developers care about crawlability, site speed, and other technical things, SEOs are mostly focused on what constitutes their sacred grail: website rankings and ROI.

Hence, what may be an OK site URL structure to a web dev, could be a totally SEO-unfriendly URL architecture to an SEO manager:

What is an SEO-friendly URL Structure?

First of all, let me start by saying that it is always better to call in an SEO manager early in the development stage, so there is no need to make sometimes hard-to-implement tweaks afterward.

From an SEO point of view, a site’s URL structure should be:

• Straightforward: URLs with duplicate content should have canonical URLs specified for them; there should be no confusing redirects on the site, etc.

• Meaningful: URL names should have keywords in them, not gibbering numbers and punctuation marks.

• With an emphasis on the right URLs: SEO-wise, not all URLs on a site are of equal importance as a rule. Some even should be concealed from the search engines. At the same time, it is important to check that the pages that ought to be accessible to the search engines are actually open for crawling and indexing.

So, here is what one can do to achieve an SEO-friendly site URL structure:

1. Consolidate www & non-www Domain Versions

As a rule, there are two major versions of your domain indexed in the search engines, the www and the non-www version of it. These can be consolidated in more than one way, but I’d mention the most widely accepted practice.

Most SEOs (in my experience) use the 301 redirect to point one version of their site to the other (or vice versa).

Alternatively (for instance, when you can’t do a redirect), you can specify your preferred version in Google Webmaster Tools in Configuration >> Settings >> Preferred Domain. However,this has certain drawbacks:

• This takes care of Google only
• This option is restricted to root domains only. If you have an example.wordpress.com site, this method is not for you.

But why worry about the www vs non-www issue in the first place? The thing is, some of your backlinks may be pointing to your www version, while some could be going to the non-www version.

To ensure both versions’ SEO value is consolidated, it’s better to explicitly establish this link between the two (either via the 301 redirect, or in Google Webmaster Tools, or by using a canonical tag – I’ll talk about that one a bit further).

2. Avoid Dynamic & Relative URLs

Depending on your content management system, the URLs it generates may be “pretty” like this one:

www.example.com/topic-name

or “ugly” like this one:

www.example.com/?p=578544

As I said earlier, search engines have no problem with either variant, but for certain reasons it’s better to use static (prettier) URLs rather than dynamic(uglier) ones. The thing is, static URLs contain your keywords and are more user-friendly, since one can figure out what the page is about just by looking at the static URL’s name.

Besides, Google recommends using hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in URL names, since a phrase in which the words are connected using underscores is treated by Google as one single word, e.g. one_single_wordis onesingleword to Google.

And, to check what other elements of your page should have the same keywords as your URLs, have a look at the screenshot 3 of the “On-Page SEO for 2013: Optimize Pages to Rank and Perform” guide that we released recently.

Besides, some web devs make use of relative URLs. The problem with relative URLs is that they are dependent on the context in which they occur. Once the context changes, the URL may not work. SEO-wise, it is better to use absolute URLs instead of relative ones, since the former are what search engines prefer.

Now, sometimes different parameters can be added to the URL for analytics tracking or other reasons (such as sid, utm, etc.) To make sure that these parameters don’t make the number of URLs with duplicate content grow over the top, you can do either of the following:

• Ask Google to disregard certain URL parameters in Google Webmaster Tools in Configuration > URL Parameters.
• See if your content management system allows you to solidify URLs with additional parameters with their shorter counterparts.

3. Create an XML Sitemap

An XML Sitemap is not to be confused with the HTML sitemap. The former is for the search engines, while the latter is mostly designed for human users.

What is an XML Sitemap? In plain words, it’s a list of your site’s URLs that you submit to the search engines. This serves two purposes:

1. This helps search engines find your site’s pages more easily;
2. Search engines can use the Sitemap as a reference when choosing canonical URLs on your site.

The word “canonical” simply means “preferred” in this case. Picking a preferred (canonical) URL becomes necessary when search engines see duplicate pages on your site.

So, as they don’t want any duplicates in the search results, search engines use a special algorithm to identify duplicate pages and pick just one URL to represent the group in the search results. Other webpages just get filtered out.

Now, back to sitemaps … One of the criteria search engines may use to pick a canonical URL for the group of webpages is whether this URL is mentioned in the website’s Sitemap.

So, what webpages should be included into your sitemap, all of your site’s pages or not? In fact, for SEO-reasons, it’s recommended to include only the webpages you’d like to show up in search.

4. Close Off Irrelevant Pages with robots.txt

There may be pages on your site that should be concealed from the search engines. These could be your “Terms and Conditions” page, pages with sensitive information, etc. It’s better not to let these get indexed, since they usually don’t contain your target keywords and only dilute the semantic whole of your site.

The robotx.txt file contains instructions for the search engines as to what pages of your site should be ignored during the crawl. Such pages get a noindex attribute and do not show up in the search results.

Sometimes, however, unsavvy webmasters use noindex on the pages it should not be used. Hence, whenever you start doing SEO for a site, it is important to make sure that no pages that should be ranking in search have the noindex attribute.

5. Specify Canonical URLs Using a Special Tag

Another way to highlight canonical URLs on your site is by using the so-called canonical tag. In geek speak, it’s not the tag itself that is canonical, but the tag’s parameter, but we’ll just call it the canonical tag by metonymy.

Note: the canonical tag should be applied only with the purpose of helping search engines decide on your canonical ULR. For redirection of site pages, use redirects. And, for paginated content, it makes sense to employ rel=”next” and rel=”prev” tags in most cases.

For example, on Macy’s website, I can go to the Quilts & Bedspreads page directly, or I can take different routes from the homepage:

• I can go to Homepage >>Bed& Bath >> Quilts & Bedspreads. The following URL with my pass recorded is generated:

http://www1.macys.com/shop/bed-bath/quilts-bedspreads?id=22748&edge=hybrid&cm_sp=us_catsplash_bed-%26-bath-_-row6-_-quilts-%26-bedspreads

• Or I can go to Homepage >> For the Home >> Bed & Bath >> Bedding >> Quilts & Bedspreads. The following URL is generated:

http://www1.macys.com/shop/bed-bath/quilts-bedspreads?id=22748&edge=hybrid

Now, all three URLs lead to the same content. And, if you look into the code of each page, you’ll see the following tag in the head element:

As you see, for each of these URLs, a canonical URL is specified, which is the cleanest version of all the URLs in the group:

http://www1.macys.com/shop/bed-bath/quilts-bedspreads?id=22748

What this does is, it funnels down the SEO value each of these three URLs might have to one single URL that should be displayed in the search results (the canonical URL). Normally search engines do a pretty good job identifying canonical URLs themselves.

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