(This is the latest article in my "SEO Basics" series on Gooruze.)

Whoever said "a picture is worth a thousand words" didn't have a clue about SEO. A great photo can be an effective selling tool, and is a must for selling a product, but words have a lot more responsibility overall. On your web site, the words you use have to

* sell your company, products or services,
* convert visitors to customers, and
* improve your search engine rankings.

Clearly, great copywriting is an integral part of your online success.

Mythbusting 101

Let's start by killing off one of the great myths about writing for the web: Everything you've heard about no one wanting to read the information on web pages is wrong. The Internet is the greatest research tool ever. Millions of shoppers use web sites to research products and services before they buy, and you can bet they're reading web pages very carefully. It's laughable to think that text isn't important "because no one reads web pages." People do, and search engine spiders do. So, don't underestimate the need for great copy.

Know Your Audience

The first step in every successful communication is knowing your audience. For the purposes of this article, the question is "Who are you writing for?", and I just gave away the answer in the previous paragraph: people and search engines.

This is the great challenge of writing great copy for the web: the words you use must get people to your web site (by writing for the search engines) and then convert them from visitors into customers (by writing for them). So there are two different types of writing in play on your web site, and your job is to write both ways simultaneously.

Writing for Humans

Entire courses, books, and businesses are devoted to the art of copywriting, so I won't pretend to cover it in a couple paragraphs here. But there are two elemental aspects of copywriting that are easy to understand and use when writing copy for your web site:

1.) Focus on benefits, not features.
2.) Write a compelling "call to action."

Focusing on benefits, not features means you don't just write about the technical aspects of the red widget you sell. You need to write about the benefits to the consumer -- why he/she needs it, how it will solve his/her problem or make the consumer's life better. You want to make an emotional connection with the customer.

A compelling call to action is how you get your web site visitor to become a customer. You want the person to take some action -- it may be placing an order online, or signing up for your mailing list, or picking up the phone and calling for more information. Whatever it is, it's a key element of writing copy for your web site.

There's so much more to copywriting, but if you at least remember these two fundamentals, you'll be on the right track to converting visitors into customers.

Writing for Search Engines

Search engine crawlers don't care about emotional connections. They don't care about benefits over features. They're cold-blooded machines with an algorithm that scientifically analyzes every word they find to determine what exactly a web page is about. And you have to keep them happy, too, if you want people to find your site in search engine results.

Once you've established the important search engine keywords and phrases for your site, your goal is to work these words and phrases into the written copy of your pages. Don't repeat the same words and phrases too often on a single page. Even the choice of words to highlight in bold or larger text matters to search engines. And whenever possible, if some of your copy can be linked to another page on your site, it should. In other words, if your home page copy talks about the benefits of your red widgets, the phrase "red widgets" should link to your page about red widgets.

Of course, you have to do all of this SEO writing in such a way that it doesn't adversely impact the emotional impact of the text. It's a fine line to walk.

How Much is Enough? Too Much?

You may have heard that you must have 200 words per page (or more) in order to connect with both human visitors and search engine crawlers, but the reality is that there's no way to set a fixed size goal for every page of a web site.

When wondering if you've written enough, or too much, keep in mind what your two audiences want:

1.) Search engines want to know what a web page is about.
2.) Visitors want to know the benefits of your product or service.

It's quite possible that a well-written page can give each audience what it wants in as little as a paragraph or two; other pages may require several paragraphs. There's no fixed answer - it depends on the subject matter.

But if you're going to err, it's better to err with too much copy than not enough. Search engines can't rank a web page if they don't have enough to determine what it's about. And human visitors will just go to the next web site if they don't get enough information from you.

Conclusion

Don't underestimate the need for great copy on your web site, and plenty of it. It's what both of your audiences want. And the web sites that deliver great copy to both users and search engine crawlers are usually the ones enjoying the most success.