Secrets to Writing SEO Copy, with Google Snippets

Secret 1 to writing SEO copy: Writing for Search Snippets

Still working today, this trick entails writing copy so that hotly searched keyword phrases are close together on the page. Doing this, we are hedging our bets that these phrases come up in a small “snippet” (the paragraph under your search result) when Google decides to display those words, rather than a carefully written “meta description”. I first learned of this technique in The World’s Best Kept Copywriting Secrets – chapter 25. (Written by experts in their various fields of copywriting).

Search results showing a snippet

Real Search Example

You’ll see on my example screen shot – “affordable copywriting Brisbane” – it shows how Google picks out my POW meta description (keywords are in bold), but for Red Planet Design’s listing it displays a “snippet” from the page text (also our blog under another business).  This exemplifies how you must have a good meta description written AND pay attention to long keyword phrases being searched for.

While not many people are searching for this particular phrase (strangely), you would be surprised how precise and “long-tail” keyword searches are getting.

A good overall SEO writing technique means to always to write everything in full. Not “when you need consulting services”, but “when you need IT consulting services”.  Often these keyword phrases will end up displayed in snippets. Sometimes, though, other items will be at searched for, like “IT consultants health industry”, “Beauty products under $25.00″, etc. This is where Google’s helpful Rich Snippets data structuring can be useful.

Secret 2 to writing SEO copy: Using hidden code called “Rich Snippets”

If you have a really content rich site, you’ll be interested in this secret. Google itself says:

“With rich snippets, webmasters with sites containing structured content—such as review sites or business listings—can label their content to make it clear that each labeled piece of text represents a certain type of data: for example, a restaurant name, an address, or a rating.”

So, structured data can be any type of: reviews, people profiles, products, business listings, recipes, and events. People searching for their favorite food, branded goods, a person, gifts with a price range, will benefit from Google’s snippet functionality. Much more advice about rich snippets at Google.

How To. Use microdata, microformats, or highly detailed RDFa to code snippets. If you look up those pages, it contains some instructions – you can simply pass this on to your webmaster to implement, with some ideas for what type of info people would be seeking.

Also, a good SEO plugin for WordPress will use “Rich Snippet type” as an easy pull-down on each post (well, I noticed it in my SEO plugin so it could well be in many of them). SEO plugins let you control the Title & Description tags for each post, so they are quite handy. I use SEO Ultimate and Platinum SEO is also good.

This Tool is handy to check structured data for any type of website: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

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