• by Rob Garner , November 21, 2007

If there is one black mark that some search-engine-friendly copywriters will have left on the early years of digital marketing and advertising history, it will be for how they managed to butcher various language structures throughout the world with their new brand of "search engine friendly copywriting" style. 
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For those who are fairly new to search engine-friendly copywriting and optimization, the whole problem started years ago when many soon-to-be search-engine-friendly copywriters noticed a pattern in search engines such as AltaVista and Google, where the top results tended to skew more toward copy with higher repetition of whatever targeted "search-engine friendly" keyword phrases they happened to be using. 

With their newfound search engine friendly copywriting knowledge and skills, some of these search engine friendly copywriters went out and presented search engine friendly copywriting seminars, and wrote lengthy articles on how to write "search engine friendly copy." As their search engine friendly copywriting recommendations were implemented, with repetitions of keywords as high as 20 to30 times in a 200-word search engine friendly copywriting article, these search engine friendly copy-written pages began to rank highly for terms such as "search engine friendly copywriting" and such.  

While search-engine-friendly copywriters continued to write about more diverse topics as "search engine friendly copywriting company" and "search engine friendly copywriting techniques," they also ensured that their search engine friendly copy had plenty of search engine friendly keyword repetition.        

What traditional copywriters did not understand, the search engine friendly copywriters would say, was that search engines read search-engine-friendly copy very literally, and if the copy wasn't "search engine friendly" enough for the given optimized keyword or keyphrase (for example, the keyphrase "search engine friendly copywriting"), then the page was less likely to rank, especially if it was not search engine friendly.  

Most of the professional search engine friendly copywriters have since backed off of the concept of practicing search engine friendly copywriting styles that incorporate excessive repetition of search engine friendly keywords, and are writing search engine friendly copy that is more easily read by humans, while still being "search engine friendly." This is a good thing, because even though copy may be deemed "search engine friendly," it doesn't necessarily make it readable, or sound intelligent enough that someone might want to actual convert to a customer, no matter how "search engine friendly" the copywriting may be.           &nb sp;                                  ;               

So how many times should you repeat your target keyword in an article or passage so that it is both "search engine friendly" and "human friendly" enough?  How about once, in the first paragraph, as it relates to your main page theme. And don't forget to put the keyword theme in other search engine friendly areas of the page, like the title element, heading and alt text.        

To all of the U.S. Search Insider readers who managed to make it through this column on this Happy Thanksgiving Eve, have a Happy Thanksgiving, and enjoy your Happy Thanksgiving dinner.  May you have many more Happy Thanksgivings to come.   (To the rest of the world, Happy Thursday.)