To be displayed at the top by search engines is the dream of any business. How exactly this can be achieved, however, many don’t know, but we might be able to help a bit by showing you how to adjust your text for SEO.

Matt Cutts, the former head of the web spam team at Google, gets to the point by highlighting that the quality of your content, and the links that you receive as a consequence, determine how high you are ranked in search engines. We provide you with a few tips that help you making it work:

1. Useful Content

Google wants mainly one thing: Not the "best", the "prettiest" or "most modern", but the most useful search results. This means that good content must be comprehensible, as it is otherwise of little use to the reader. Therefore, make sure to write in a way your reader understands - then Google is satisfied.

Here are some guidelines:

• Use clear, short sentences with a maximum of 20 words.
• Your words should be simple and have 2llables.
• Stay away from technical terms that your readers might not understand.
• Write pictorially and activate the imagination of your customers.

2. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)

LSI keywords help search engines extract meaning from words with more than one meaning (orange the company vs. the fruit or color). Google wins in particular by a latent semantic analysis method that finds a generic term on the basis of several terms. By typing in, for example, "animal" and "meow" in the search bar, “cat” gets proposed automatically. So, make sure to use certain semantically interconnected keywords in your text.

How to find them? Embark on keyword research. The easiest way is still to enter your main keyword in Google and see what terms the search engine suggests (Google Suggest): For instance, assuming your business centers on flowers, if you enter "flower" in Google, the search engine proposes "flowers online" and "send flowers" among others. Hence, you should link articles on your site that have to do with those terms. Or let us go one step further: When looking for "floral arrangement", Google automatically links the keyword with the terms "marriage", "burial" and "baptism", but also with "do it yourself" and "design ideas". To many of these topics, you should also publish a matching item on your website, as this increases the likelihood that potential customers can find you.

3. Keywords

Google hates keyword stuffing, which means the senseless insertion of as many keywords as possible per sentence. However, the search engine leader absolutely appreciates when keywords and especially their synonyms are cleverly placed in the text. Having the main keyword in the title is in particular effective -at the beginning of the teaser and in an <h1> -Headline. Depending on the length of the text, it is quite possible to have it 3 to 5 times and don’t forget using synonyms as well.

4. Long Content

The longer the content, the better for the Google ranking. An analysis of the Google search revealed that the first places have a significantly larger word count than lower placed results.

Therefore, don’t save on space, especially since the web has enough of it! On the other hand, also keep in mind that just because the content is long does not necessarily mean more useful. So, before you produce unnecessary content, just to get more words, consider a slightly smaller number of words, but meaningful content.

5. Constantly updated content

Google likes in particular documents that are constantly updated. So, feel free to publish updates of existing chapters, especially since information is outdated relatively fast in this day and age. That way you kill two birds with one stone: you offer your customers constantly updated information to score higher with Google.

Now you know what Google pays special attention to -  and how convenient that all these factors are important for the searchers (your customers), too. So, let’s get to the keys of copywriting and check whether you have followed all factors!

By Daniela La Marca