Previously I spoke about the importance of proper site navigation and touched on the usefulness of search with respect to your own site. A very key piece to search is website content. If you don’t have proper copy on your pages, useful alt and title attributes on images and links you won’t be receiving much traffic. Along with all the copy you have, you really need to be concerned about what you say and how it is said. What keywords are you using? Are you using the words and terminology of your audience?

I often see sites that use keywords that they use themselves, and are not of the language used by their consumers. But one clear important rule is to find out what vocabulary your visitors use find your product or site. Whatever product you are selling there are a plethora of words that surround any niche any many that are different between the novice and experienced customers. Learning how someone might first try to find information about your product or what they might mistake it for or even different ways that they use it that are not exactly the ways it was sold for can be searched when they are not specifically searching for your exact product. A prime example of this is dryer sheets, I found by accident when trying to figure out how to clean up animal fur (I have a cat and two rabbits) that dryer sheets can be used to remedy the problem. Then along the way I found that Bounce had jumped on this concept and has this type of content in their site now (but it’s in flash so it’s very hard to find unfortunately.) These additional uses play into how your audience sees your product, how they search for it specifically or stumble upon it on accident.

Proper keywords need to be flowed with care into your copy so that it feels natural and without force so the user will get the picture naturally. They can exist in titles, paragraph descriptions, tag attributes, headers (your H1 and H2 tags). if you don’t know enough about these, learn a bit or find someone to help you out.

Please don’t just start jamming synonyms willy-nilly into your pages, think about your language, how it sounds aloud, how it appears next to other imagery and copy. Don’t forget you’re trying to get someone interested in what you have to say and sell.

In this post I used different words for keywords: vocabulary, copy, words, terminology, content, language
As well as different words for visitors: audience, users, customers, consumers
Along with other keywords that will drive users to this post: synonyms, traffic, website, site, links, search
These were all thought about to provide enough searchable copy that will drive consumers to this post.