A few days ago, my co-worker Chris pointed out a really well written blog post by SEOMoz.  It wasn’t just well written, it was perfectly formatted, and had all the earmarks of a webpage that both search engines and users would love.

All of the elements are perfect in this page.  Relevant keywords appear in the title, the meta info (sans keywords tag because they don’t believe in using outdated methods,) the header tags and the body copy.  There are pictures all of which have alt tags which include the appropriate keywords. All of Rand’s ducks are in a row here.

Well placed headers and paragraph breaks draw the eye effortlessly down the page and sparse, informative copy tells us all exactly what we need to know.  Somewhat ironically, the page itself was about composing the perfect, search engine optimized page. If only everyone could write web content that gracefully appeals to the user as well as the search engines.

Not So Stellar Examples Of SEO Writing

I was browsing SEOchat.com when I realized that the page was making me dizzy.  This article on blogging for beginners was full of good information, but it was extremely hard to read on a computer screen.

The copy was written in small, closely spaced text.  There were no Header tags or bullet point lists to break up the blocks of copy and worst of all, you had to keep clicking on “next page” to read the whole thing. What’s wrong with scrolling I ask you?  I ended up printing out the page so that i could make some sense of it, but if I hadn’t been so intent on getting that information I would have bounced immediately.

On the other side of the coin, this post on web design breaks up the copy far too much. The images that they use are far too large for the page width and force you to scroll down excessively before you can continue reading. They used bullet points but the list contained way too much information pre section and were still somewhat overwhelming to try to read through.

Finding the Perfect Balance

Web Copy writing is all about finding the perfect balance between supplying what the search engines need in order to establish relevancy to your site and supplying what your users need in order to have an enjoyable experience.  Pleasing the users is notoriously harder to manage than pleasing the search engines, but it can be done with a little practice.

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