Copywriting: Make Your Site Search-friendly

You’ve hired a terrific agency to design your Web site. You have competent programmers putting it together so it’s fast, clean and bug-free. You’ve registered your site into every search engine known to mankind (to date). But nobody’s finding you, and visits are light and non-productive. What could be wrong?

You may be suffering from the “My creative’s all wrong for my search engine” blues. And you’re not alone. If your site was developed more than two years ago, it’s probably not up to speed on how to be attractive to today’s crawlers.

In this, my first column for Catalog Success, I won’t cover complicated programming. I’m a writer and creative person, and that’s not my business. But it is a writer’s business to understand how to write copy that will get the action you want.

Keep It Plain and Simple

Make your Web site easy to find by search indexes, otherwise known as search engines. The biggest search engines have software called spiders or robots (or “bots” for short) that grab some amount of information stored in your Web pages. They then index and store the information so that when someone is doing research for things like products or services, the engines immediately can find that information.

There also are indexes that don’t use spiders. In fact, a small number of them contain background information about each page in your site that includes titles, descriptions and keywords. These indexes are less important. And finally, of course, there are pay-per-click systems.

The key to making your Web site attractive to all of these elements is to plan carefully in your programming by writing powerful keywords and engaging on-the-pages copy or “content.”

Surprising Results from Analysis

To make it work best from a “keyword” point of view, conduct a keyword analysis; you may be surprised which words on your site actually are bringing in your customers.