A big part of my success as a freelance writer can be attributed to the concept of SEO copy writing. In this article, we are going to take a look at what SEO copy writing is and how it has changed over the years. We are also going to take a look into our crystal ball to see what the future of SEO is, based of course on fairly educated guesses.

What is SEO copy writing?

When you are looking for information on the Internet, where’s the first place you go? It’s pretty likely that you go to one of the big search engines (Google.com, Yahoo.com, MSN.com, AskJeeves.com, and so on) and type in your query, then check out the results until you find something useful. Statistics say that at least 51% of new visitors to Internet sites find their way to the site in this way.

In fact, you probably found your way to this site that way, if Alex and I are doing our jobs properly! That job, as far as marketing goes, is making sure that the web pages we have on the site rank, and rank well, on the search engines. The process is called Search Engine Optimization, and involves a lot of processes which for me are very boring, save one, SEO copy writing.

SEO copy writing is an important concept for anyone who wants to make a living writing on the Internet. You might never set a page or site up yourself, but some basic knowledge in the area will help you to sell yourself when you are bidding on a job or proposing that a potential new client should use your services.

When it comes to web sites, content is king. Search engines crawl the Internet with “spiders” on a regular basis, and these spiders (or “bots”) index pages according to their content. When a person types in a search query (such as “How can I make money writing”, for example) pages are ranked according to the relevance of the content the spiders found. If a site has a lot of content in the form of text.

SEO copy writing, then and now

No one can really claim a full knowledge as to how search engine optimization really works. This is because the search engine companies keep their formulae for ranking pretty close to their chests; they don’t want people abusing the system. Most of the techniques you will see as far as SEO practices are arrived at through experimentation, albeit a lot of experimentation that seems to work all the time.

What we do know is that sites with good content tend to rank fairly high for queries, and that content comes about through good SEO copy writing. This process has come a long way since search engines started up. Good rankings used to be dependent on links, until that system was abused. Then it became about keywords, another method which was abused (see our article on keyword writing, which details that a little bit more). Today, the search engine algorithms have been adapted to exclude a lot of the useless content that used to be found in a search.

What this means for SEO copy writing

You don’t have to take my word for all this, there is another great articles on search engine copywriting. What these articles and everything else in the evolution of SEO and SEO writing points to is that search engines are becoming more and more concerned with meeting the needs of the people that use them; they want to provide highly relevant, useful information every time someone makes a query.

I, for one, am delighted with this direction, and if you are a good writer you will be too. What it means is that poor writers, those who can’t seem to string a sentence together or form an argument in logical sequence, won’t be a huge worry as far as competition anymore. Why? Because even on the Internet, people do expect a certain quality in the pieces they read. They don’t want a bunch of information that is difficult to read or downright useless, they want meaty articles that they can rely on and sink their teeth into (this doesn’t mean that you will be allowed to bring all your skills to bear because the average Internet reader will still prefer an article written at the grade 7 level). Writers who take pride in their work will once again be able to command the prices that they deserve.

The golden rule of SEO copy writing

Because of the nature of the search engine business, I have long maintained that the golden rule when it comes to writing for search engine optimization purposes, the key is not to follow the rules that seem to work for the engines, but to follow rules that you KNOW work for human readers. After all, humans are who the search engines have been set up for, not the spiders and the bots. If you keep that in mind when you are looking for, and once you land, SEO copy writing jobs, your pieces will do fine and your customers will be happy.