Heather is the chair of the Direct Marketing Association’s Search Engine Marketing Council, the author of Successful Search Engine Copywriting (the benchmark work on the subject), and a petite, caffeine-fueled spitfire.

She’s dyed her hair red since this photo was taken, so the ’spitfire’ label really fits.

Heather is one of the very few people (another is Nick Usborne) who have been working in SEO for over a decade. Almost all of the people who worked in SEO ten years ago are gone. They were the ‘black hats’ who learned the tricks that fooled the search engine algorithms. Google, Yahoo and the others (with their armies of PhDs) have upgraded those search algorithms to the point where it’s almost impossible to fool them.

People who work in SEO today fall into two categories:

1. Those who focus on driving traffic to sites. That’s done primarily through keyword selection and link building; and
2. Those who work to drive traffic, but focus more on converting surfers into buyers. Search engines don’t buy. People buy. People need to be persuaded with quality content. So the second type of SEO providers are either professional copywriters themselves, or they hire professional copywriters to work with them.

Heather had a lot to say in her half day session. As with the other conference speakers, I’ll synopsize her content, and then I’ll go into more detail as I implement on my site and for my clients.

• use no more than five (preferably three) keyphrases per web page, if a client wants more - say, “No”
• home pages should have more generic keyphrases
• pages deeper in the navigation should have more specific keyphrases
• each page should contain approximately 250 words
• if a content management template limits you to 100 or 50 words, add a link to an article/case study/whitepaper, etc. that is RELEVANT to the intended audience
• use FAQ pages, Glossaries, etc. to add keyphrase-rich content
• recruit only RELEVANT links, adding links from unrelated sites will hurt search engine rankings
• Wikipedia ranks high for thousands of keyphrases because of quality CONTENT that RELEVANT sites link to.

There is much more, which I’ll share with you as I implement over the next couple of months.

Tags: content, Copywriting, keyphrases, SEO