Search engine optimization is not a one way street although it feels like it sometimes. One of my clients recently rewrote the headlines and some of the copy I wrote because the requirements of SEO made some of it awkward.

I actually was okay with most of their changes. It will affect their placement but it won’t hurt too much. They will still get more traffic than they are getting now but they won’t ever be first page on the search engines.

My two big issues were that one, they didn’t consult me at all before making the changes, and two, they didn’t use my Home page copy at all.

This is going to really hurt them. For one, they now have no SEO on their Home page. Second, they have no keywords in their Home page copy. Third, they have no links in their Home page copy which creates two problems.

First, they have to rely on the links on the side of the page to get people deeper in the site. The copy on the page leads readers nowhere. It’s static. When the people get to the end of the copy they have to decide for themselves whether or not to go deeper into the site which means you’ve lost control of the conversation and since you aren’t guiding them, you have to trust that they’ll click on one of the side links.

Second, you’ve lost all the Google “juice” you get from having anchored text in the copy. Link anchor text is a link within the copy that leads to more information about the subject of the link. The link above is anchor text. It leads to a definition of link anchor text, hence, more information about the term.

Google loves anchor text. It tells them that you are providing quality information to your visitor and makes them more inclined to send people to your website. It also makes it easier for the robots or spiders to crawl the site and get to the important information.

When I write a Home page, I have two priorities:

1. I break up the page into subheads because people on the web don’t read. They scan for the information they want and then read that. So I create subheads with brief descriptive paragraphs to intrigue readers and a link to more information on the subject that they’ve stopped to read about. In this way, I stay in control of the conversation while giving the reader the illusion of control.
2. My other priority is strategically placing the correct keywords in the correct ratio to copy and creating anchored text links with the keywords in them.

If you toss out the Home page copy wholesale, you’ve thrown out the baby, the bathwater, and any chance you had for either high placement in the search engines or converting visitors into buyers.

Originally posted 2008-12-13 23:51:45. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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