When you’re writing content for your website, SEO experts will say, “you must select a keyword phrase you want to rank for.” Use that phrase in the page title. Put it in an <h1> tag. Have the keyword phrase make up 5% of the content itself. Or is it 10%? Make sure the keyword phrase is in the meta-tags. Or do those not matter anymore? Search engine optimization can be confusing.

Don’t overthink it. It’s important to remember a key point made by Mike Schechter of Honora Pearls at the 2010 Content Marketing Summit in Louisville, KY earlier this week. (Hat tip to Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer for tweeting the quote.)

“You’re talking to your customer AND GOOGLE at the same time.”

At the highest level, most websites have two primary goals:

1. Attract more traffic
2. Convince site visitors to take some sort of action (buy your product, sign up for your newsletter, make a donation, view additional pages, etc.)

SEO can help attract traffic in a big way, so it’s important to do what you can to make your site appear on the first page for your most important keyword phrases.

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Second, you can also sabotage what might be the more critical goal – the conversion rate of your call-to-action.

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Just make sure you don’t go overboard and sabotage your efforts.

First, consider that SEO has two major components – onsite optimization and inbound links. And the inbound links are significantly more important. How do you attract valuable inbound links? By writing compelling content that people want to link to, of course. You can seriously reduce the likelihood that people will want to link to your content if it’s basically just a bunch of keyword phrases strung together.

Second, you can also sabotage what might be the more critical goal – the conversion rate of your call-to-action.

Good SEO practitioners understand the need for balance. Imagine you own a local Italian restaurant in Chicago and you want to optimize for keywords like “chicago”, “italian” and “restaurant.” You might be tempted to write copy like:

Aldo’s, a Chicago Italian restaurant, has some of the most delicious Italian food in Chicago. You would be hard pressed to find a restaurant in all of Chicago that serves better Italian food. Our Chicago Italian restaurant has fed some of the most discriminating diners in all of Chicago.

Google may (or may not) find this interesting, but it is doubtful any human readers would.

So what should you do when developing content?

• Write copy that educates or entertains without worrying overly much about the keywords it contains. It’s more important that people will want to read it, link to it, and share it.
• Structure the copy in a way that makes it easy to read online. Use headers to break up long blocks of text. Bullet lists work well online. Very generally, try to keep marketing copy short. Brian Clark at Copyblogger has tons of great advice for successful online copywriting.
• Do some basic keyword research. Strike the right balance between keyword competitiveness and the expected number of searches for those keywords. In other words, be realistic. You’re rather unlikely to rank well for “Italian restaurant,” but maybe you can rank on Google’s first search engine results page for “Northern Chicago Italian restaurant.” Most companies have an easier time ranking well for lots of small traffic keywords than trying to compete for the more generic ones. In aggregate it leads to the same level of traffic either way.
• Try to optimize just one keyword phrase on one web page. Otherwise you dilute your efforts. Again, remember that balance is more important so don’t worry too much if other keywords creep in.

So, given all of that, what are some basic ways to optimize web pages for better search results without going overboard? That’s coming up in part 2 of this post series…

In the end, SEO keywords can be important — but not at the expense of writing content people want to read and share.

Need help developing compelling web copy? Designing your website for balance? Performing keyword research? Or just uncertain how to execute the advice in this post? Give us a call.