The Opportunity
Author's note: You'll get the most out of Copywriting for Search Engines if you first read the introductory chapter: Keyphrase Research.
Search-engine optimized (SEO) copywriting is the art of strategically inserting words into a webpage's text in order to improve the page's search-engine ranking for those words.
Copywriting for search engines works because Google and Yahoo identify whether content is relevant to a user's "search terms" by identifying which webpages include those words prominently and frequently.
By using the copywriting techniques explained in this chapter, you can dramatically improve your webpages' rankings in search results at Google, Yahoo, and most other search engines, leading to a situation where "the rich get richer": A top 10 search-engine ranking will drive more traffic to your website, which will attract more people to link to you, which will drive even more traffic to your website.
More subtly, you will create multiple entrances to your website. Pages deep within your site that focus on a single topic will start to attract more direct visitors than your home page. That's a good thing because internet surfers will go directly to the content they care about most, without the attrition caused by your navigation system. Best of all, you can have tens or hundreds of pages at your website, beyond your home page, attracting internet visitors on the topic of their choice and at the moment of their greatest willingness to act.
The copywriting techniques described in this chapter apply equally well to internet press releases. The next time you publish a press release, your announcement could appear at the top of the search results at Google News, Yahoo News, and other news sites that reporters and bloggers search for stories.
Frankly, it costs no more to copywrite a webpage well than it does to copywrite a webpage poorly, so you might as well do it well. Besides, every other internet advocacy technique relies on effective copywriting. Failure to copywrite for search engines will make every other internet advocacy technique more expensive, less effective, or both.
