I got inspired to write this from the article on Wordtracker’s site: Stop the Slaughter of Innocent Copy! For those of you who are somehow not familiar with how wonderful Wordtracker can be for any kind of online marketing, go try the free trial now! And if you really want to go at it, try it for a day or a week. You’ll be amazed at what you can dig up with it.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of using your keyword phrases too much in your copy. If you read on webmaster forums, it isn’t at all unusual to see people arguing about what percentage of the text should be a particular keyphrase. You’ll also see people saying it doesn’t really matter all that much.

There certainly is an advantage to having your targeted phrases on the page you are trying to attract traffic to. There’s no doubt about that. It’s one of the factors that can attract search engines.

Unfortunately, the abuse of keywords rapidly drives customers away.

There is some hope. If you read much about search engines, you may have also heard of terms such as Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). The quick explanation of LSI is that the search engines like it if you use related words as well as the particular phrase you’re optimizing for.

Suppose you’re writing about fitness. Would the word “exercise” also tend to appear or would you try to only use “fitness?” Would it sound natural?

Similarly, if you’re writing about “aerobic exercise,” using the word “aerobics” instead would come across quite naturally. And search engines are steadily learning to appreciate more natural copy. Google claims over 100 factors impact your ranking.

The Wordtracker article also brings up some wonderful points on how to use keywords naturally when you don’t want them to apply to your product. Calling your product cheap, as they note, is not flattering when you do it, even if someone is searching using the word “cheap” as a part of the search phrase. The implication is entirely different.

The trick is to use such phrases in comparison to your own product, rather than in description of it. It lets you sell something related to that phrase even when you don’t want to describe it in a particular way. Done right this should be very powerful.

Master these and other techniques, and you can learn to write good copy while still getting the attention of the search engines. But you have to remember your customers first. If you repel them, your sales die, no matter how much traffic the search engines send you.

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