Once you have mastered SEO or Search Engine Optimisation with regard to keywords and general copywriting for the web, there are more things you can do to improve your website’s ranking in search engines.

One very important ranking factor is your tags. Both, your title tags and meta tags aren’t visible in the body copy of your website, but people will see this vital information when they are using search engines. On the results page, search engines display search results with a title followed by a two-line description – your title and meta tags. Therefore, the information in both title and meta tags are not only important for search engines, but will entice browsers to click through to your website.

A good title tag should be around 70 characters including spaces (as search engines won’t display more characters). Be sure to include your optimised keywords in your title tag. The same applies to meta tags. However, in meta tags you have a little more room – up to 160 characters including spaces. Make sure you craft a keyword-rich, enticing description of your page. Finally, title and meta tags should be customised for each page of your website.

Other important SEO factors to consider are navigation and links. The navigation of your website should be clear and easy to follow. This not only helps tremendously for user friendliness, but also helps search engines to index your website correctly. As a rule of thumb: if your human visitors get confused, so do search engines, which has, of course, negative effects on your ranking efforts.

With regards to links, lots of incoming links demonstrate your website’s popularity to search engines which is good for ranking. A good internal linking structure (links within your website) also helps with ranking.

Last but not least, the speed at which your website loads is an SEO factor. Factors affecting the loading speed are, for example, the file size of images on your site, your web hosting and the complexity of the code in which your website is written. At TML Web Design we use WordPress to build our websites which generates the fast-loading, simple code that search engines like, and we host your website with a renowned web hosting company. So get in touch and we can design your website or rebuild your existing one!

The search engine ranking power of your website depends on a whole lot of factors and approaching SEO or Search Engine Optimisation can look a daunting task. Not so with TML Web Design’s SEO Basics! We have compiled an easy introduction to using keywords for SEO so you can improve the ranking of your website by following some quick SEO tips.

Firstly, read our post on Copy Writing for the Web. Equipped with this knowledge, there are some additional things to look out for when creating smart SEO body copy. While any keyword-rich web content will help in ranking, you should know how to use your keywords effectively. Firstly, think about keyword phrases rather than single keywords. That means, if you provide Wellington-based boutique B&B and apartment accommodation it isn’t effective to try and rank for the single keyword ‘accommodation’ as you would compete with accommodation providers world-wide. So working with keyword phrases such as ‘Boutique B&B Wellington’ and ‘Apartments Wellington’ makes more sense.

Secondly, you should choose a keyword phrase (or closely related group of keyword phrases) for each page of your website. If you are trying to cover all of your keywords in all of your pages, you’ll end up ranking for nothing. In the accommodation provider example you would, for example, optimise your keywords around B&B accommodation on a B&B page and focus on keywords around apartment accommodation on another page.

Furthermore, you should always include your keyword phrases in headers, and you might consider highlighting some important terms with boldface. (Don’t overdo the latter though!) Finally, search engines love fresh content (and lots of it). This is where regular blogging comes in. If you aren’t confident about writing blogs for your website, TML web design offers excellent blogging services and can help you out – contact us today!

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Everyone wants good rankings for their websites. Everyone wants user-friendly content. Everyone wants high searchability. Well, here’s how you can achieve all of this with some simple TML web copy writing tips. The magic trick is to write web content which is optimised and keyword-rich but still reads natural rather than robotic.

Break it up!
The length of on-page web content should be a minimum of 250 words per page (excluding header and sidebars) because search engines like long text. However, a big block of web content isn’t user-friendly so you should break it up. The aim is to achieve scanable paragraphs of three to four lines as well as sectioned-off content under header tags so your readers can easily scan and consume your content.

Sneak in those keywords!
While you should aim for high keyword density, you don’t want your text to sound too robotic. A great way to fit in extra keywords is in optimised header tags. By using keywords in header tags you can easily up your keyword density by 1%.

Use bullet lists in the right way!
While bullet lists offer great scanability to your reader, search engines regard them as broken content which doesn’t count for as much as other page copy. A way around this is to use a keyword-rich bullet list at the top of the page to outline the page’s content. Do make sure, however, that you have about three lines preceding and following the bullet list, and that you still have a minimum of 250 words of unbroken content on the page. This ensures that search engines still properly index your page but you don’t have to compromise on scanability.

Do your homework!
As with everything in life, you have to do your homework before beginning your web copy writing. Think about your target audience and what they really need and want to know. Make sure your homepage has a very concise synopsis of what you offer. Then tie your copy into specific ‘call to action’ graphics such as joining your newsletter, completing a quote request or adding a product to a shopping cart to move the visitor to take the action you want.

As there is clearly a lot to consider when it comes to writing for the web, we understand if you would prefer to leave it in the hands of the experts and contact us to do your copy writing for you!

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