Sundance

Good web copywriting used to revolve around mathematical equations that tried to second guess what search engines wanted. The goal was to find the sweet spot where your key words and phrases were mentioned the optimum amount of times. Too few keyword occurrences and your pages wouldn't rank highly, two many and the spiders would flag you for keyword stuffing.

Things have changed.

Search engine technology has moved forward and now key word density is far less important. In fact I would urge you not to even bother calculating your keyword density. Instead just concentrate on what you are writing about, and ensure that your perspective or information is unique and involving. 

Latent Semantic Indexing.

Commonly known as LSI, Latent Semantic Indexing is the new kid on the block of search engine technology. As the major search engines' artificial intelligence grows, so does the relevancy of the top SERPS. Strides in search engine technology are at the present largely in the field of making search engines as discerning web-surfers as human beings.  LSI is good news for us web copywriters as it takes the science out of web copywriting. Increasingly we can concentrate on what we do best, writing copy.

What is good copy?

Good copy is what your visitors are looking for, nothing more and nothing less. So to write good copy you need to sit in your reader's seat and look at things from that angle. Try answering the following questions:

• What words or phrases have I searched for to land on this page?
• What specific information on that topic am I looking for?
• What other pages on other sites will I already have read and what did I not get from those pages that I am still looking for?
• What information that I don't know about might I be interested to to find?
• In the amazingly small amount of time that I will form an impression of this web site, what will win me over?

Remember, the Internet is a tool for finding information, not making money. People will find your web site through search engines when they are looking for information, so make sure that is what they find. With Latent Semantic Indexing on the march quality content really is king.

Layout is everything

The last of the above questions concerns in no small part presentation. Web sites don't need to be flashy, and there are good SEO reasons why sites with lurid graphics and complex dynamic html navigation systems are a bad idea. Some interesting research found that, in some cases, people prefer web sites that look amateur. Maybe these "ugly "web sites look as if they were created by people who are interested in the subject, not in web design.

The important thing is clarity. A good web site has:

• Clear page titling
• Information presented with bullet points
• Any large chunks of text broken up and given subheadings
• An easy-to-use navigation system, available on every page
• Graphics that add value without being intrusive
• Easily identifiable hyperlinks
• Flowing text, grammatically perfect and spell-checked
• Easy to read fonts, preferably Verdana

Bare all this in mind while you are creating your web site and you will write great content.