Textual Content Writing and Copywriting

I’m sure many of you have heard the expression “content is king”. There is a very good reason for this statement – content IS king and plays the most important role in the success of your site and your online marketing campaign. If you have excellent content, and plenty of it, then you are on the right track, your site will attract visitors, links and commendation.

The keys to creating good textual content are honesty, enthusiasm and imagination. You shouldn’t try and manipulate the information or the message you are trying to get across to your visitor, you shouldn’t try to sugar coat when a bit of imagination would do just as well! Basically if you keep these aspects in mind it will lead to one thing, quality content. That is always the overriding objective of any content builder.

Why is Textual Content so Important?

The written word is the format of most web content and the most important where the search engines are concerned. So why is text so important to the search engines?

  • Text is the only on page format which is readable by search engine spiders.
  • It is used to decipher the subject and context of your site.
  • It is used subjectively to decipher links; and what lies at the end of that link.
  • They use it to figure out whether your site is relevant to a users search.

Basically they use it to figure out everything about your site!

Writing Quality Text

When writing textual content for your site there are various aspects which should always be taken into consideration. If you want to appear professional you should write grammatically perfect and there should be no spelling mistakes, anywhere! We live in the times of the spell checker so this shouldn’t be too hard to achieve, just watch out for the common mistakes that spell checkers won’t pick up:

  • “there”, “their”, “they’re”
  • “where”, “wear”, “were”
  • “to”, “too”

You should also watch out for words that become other words when spelt incorrectly; such as “two” and “tow”.

Well written text will use grammar and structure to create flow and keep the reader entertained. Badly written text will produce “read fatigue”; this happens when the flow of the text is so poor the reader gets tired and gives it a miss! The only way to save yourself from bad writing is to have such great information or such a fascinating point that the reader puts up with the low standards.

Keyword Repetition and Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)

When writing text for a site you should always have keyword repetition and Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) in mind. They are key factors which the search engines use to evaluate the relevance of textual content to a search. Although the following advice should be taken into account the whole function of keyword repetition and LSI is to reward naturally written text, so learn both and then forget about them!

Keyword Repetition

Once you have completed the keyword research for your site you should have an idea of the sort of terms people are typing in to find sites similar to yours. When you know these terms you should start working them into your site text. The recommended rate of repetition varies depending on who you gleam the advice from but the recommendations usually fall between 2% and 4%. It is thought that this percentile area is, in general, the natural repetition that would occur if you wrote the text without keyword repetition in mind.

LSI

Latent Semantic Indexing is a devilishly complicated principal associated with the relation of words to other words. There are no standards or formulas to LSI, only your own knowledge of the topic you’re writing about can decide whether you write text with LSI in mind.

In recent years the search engines have developed their spiders to the point where they don’t just pick up exactly matching keywords within text but they also pick out keywords that relate to that keyword. So, when I write a paragraph about “fishing” I will naturally mention words such as rod, line, bait, lakes, hooks, trout etc… All these words further enhance the topic of the page and add to the relevance of that text to the keyword: fishing!

The search engines also use LSI to differentiate between the meaning of two identical words; “model”; for example could mean fashion model, matchstick model, business model, geographical model and so on.

So…

“Learn the above principals of copy-writing until they become second nature, but nothing improves copy more than genuine interest in the subject that you are writing about”.