What do you know about your website's audience? How well do you understand them? As with any communications medium, the web requires authors to have a good understanding about those with whom they wish to communicate. First and foremost, content needs to be written to draw in the reader and effectively describe the product or service you are selling, leading the user to a purchase decision - if you don't accomplish this in your copy, then what is the point of having a website? Understanding the nature of your audience is the most important part of this, and conducting online market research may lead your website's copy in a direction you never expected. Discovering which variations of your target keywords will bring the appropriate audience to your site is critical. Weaving those terms into copy that satisfies the needs of your business while speaking clearly to your audience is not an easy task, but an acquired skill.
Secondarily, how content is written determines where a website appears in relation to its true competition. For example, a search on "resume scanning" might lead to many useful articles for job searchers about how resumes are now scanned electronically. Yet, if your product is "resume scanning software" you do not necessarily need to be included in those results, unless competing products also exist there and the target audience is in fact searching for just "resume scanning". Content writing can be one of the most difficult parts of search engine marketing. You need to write to please both the search engines and your website's audience.
A good Search Engine Marketer (SEM) will understand his or her target audience. A great way to understand your targets audience's nature, you can conduct online market research. Doing thorough research can bring valuable information such as the keywords that you as an SEM needs to be targeting.
When writing your content these keywords need to be weaved into it while still focusing on the purpose on the content. When it comes to content writing the first thing you need to keep in mind is that your audience needs to be drawn in. The content needs to be interesting, descriptive and it needs to lead the audience to a purchase decision. How your content is written can affect how your website appears in relation to its competition.
To search engines such as Google, the content of your website is very important. You can no longer just pummel your content with one specific keyword to try fooling search engines into listing your website higher in its rankings. Many search engines now search your copy for relevancy, making their results more valuable to users. Another useful byproduct of writing quality content for visitors is that if they like it, they will link to it.
This will result in the page (and the site) climbing even higher in the search engines' rankings. In the end it is your website visitors that you should write for and not the search engines. Search engines are looking to please their users and so should you.
Jai Patel writes about SEO, SEM and search engine optimization .
