What Is Search Engine Friendly Copywriting?

Search engine friendly copywriting, also known as SEO copywriting, is the authoring and formatting of online copy that will make the writing appear relevant to certain search queries. It's a way of writing that helps search engines determine the web content's relevancy, which allows them to index the site that publishes the copy easier and rank it better.

The most important aspect of search engine friendly copywriting is the inclusion of keywords in the content and title. This helps search engines determine the site's relevancy. Say for example that someone googles "best pizza toppings." The search engine is going to pull up blogs and articles that contain the phrase "best pizza toppings," along with other related keywords and phrases like "things to put on pizza," or "most delicious types of pizza."

Logically, this implies that articles should be as dense with keywords as possible. A blog that says "best pizza toppings" 10 times is going to rank better than one that says it five times, right?

Stuffing as many keywords into an article as possible, however, is a bad idea. Yes, search engine friendly copywriting is done to make a site rank better, but it also needs to help the end user. Keyword stuffed articles aren't very readable or useful to the end user. Consequently, these articles are marked as spam, and actually hurt the site more than they help.

Search engine friendly copywriting needs to be useful not only to search engines, but to the end users as well. It needs to find a balance. Good SEO friendly copywriting should include about five different keywords or phrases at least once, with one being repeated often enough that it only constitutes about 1.5% to 3% of the article. Returning to our example, the pizza blogger should only mention "best pizza toppings" about five or six times in a 300 word article.

Basically, search engine friendly copywriting is a style of writing that makes an article more readable for search engines.