It seems to be a single-sided debate. When you mention keyword use, all thoughts normally go to the search engines. Copywriting, however, is more about your human visitors than it is the engines. In fact, even the mainstay of SEO copywriting (keywords) is based on a need to spur visitors along as they work through the information on your site. If you want truly effective SEO copy, you’ll take time to learn that keyword use goes beyond the search engines.

Let’s go offline for a moment. Go get your telephone book. If you were going to conduct a search for, say, an office desk, how would you go about it? You’d look in the Yellow Pages^TM under office furniture. Next you’d drill through the ads in search of ads that specifically mentioned “desks” or perhaps the particular kind of desk you want.

SEO for Newspapers?
When looking through the inserts that come with your Sunday newspaper, your eye would be especially drawn to office supply flyers that featured the word “desks” or a picture of desks. Why? Because you’ve got desks on the brain right now. You’re going to be especially sensitive to that word because that’s the current need you’re trying to fill.

The same, exact thing applies when someone searches online. Keywords started out because human Internet searchers typed them into the search engines, not because the search engines selected the terms. The same holds true today. You don’t just make up keywords. You use services and programs that allow you to research the exact phrases human beings are typing to Google, Yahoo! and other engines. When you incorporate those words and phrases into your website copy, you’re doing way more than attempting to boost your rankings; you’re also helping to navigate the site visitor from the search engine to the right page of your site.

If you’re the owner of the office supply store we’ve been talking about and you want to create a newspaper ad to sell a new line of desks you carry, what do you think might appear in the headline? The word “desk” or perhaps the phrase “office desks.” Why would you do that? There are no search engines to optimize for in the newspaper industry. You’ll include those keywords because it makes sense to do so. You’ll include them because they are descriptive of what you’re selling. You’ll include them because it will attract the readers’ attention and draw them to your store. That’s not search engine optimization; it’s just good marketing.

Lead, Don’t Shove
The same applies when writing copy for your site. There’s more than one reason to include keywords in your copy. The primary one is not the engines, it’s your site visitors. Strategic keyword placement helps guide your visitors to the information, products or services they are looking for. Don’t shove keywords in everywhere you think you can possibly fit them. Instead, use keywords to lead your visitors in the right direction.

Even if there were no such thing as search engine optimization, your copy would almost certainly still contain keywords. It only makes sense to have keywords in the headline, so visitors will know what the page is about. Sub-heads? Sure thing! People scan more than they read, so having keywords in sub-heads is a great idea. And in the body copy? You bet! After all, it’s pretty hard to sell desks without actually using the word “desk.” Since there are school desks and computer desks and many other desks, you’ll want to make it clear that your sale is for “office desks.” That, too, only makes sense.

As you can see, keyword inclusion has been going on far longer than the Internet has existed. It’s been an important part of copywriting since marketing was invented. When you create a copywriting plan for your site pages, think through which keywords you should use and where the most effective places to position those keywords would be. Then develop your SEO copy with a goal of directing your visitors to the right information. When you do, you’ll naturally optimize for the search engines at the same time.

Copyright 2006, Karon Thackston, All Rights Reserved

These tools are great for seeing how your web pages look in these handheld devices:

http://www.cached.it/english/Pda-Simulator.php

http://www.google.com/xhtml

Why dont you try it on our sites to see how accessible, and easy they are to read. Or test it on your own favourite site.

Design pages as though they were to be displayed on a text-only browser.

• Always use features of the markup designed to support alternate rendering such as the longdesc and alt attributes in XHTML.
• Use only features from the markup that are known to be supported by the device in question.
• Avoid things like CSS image replacement and pictures of words.

Valid Markup

• If the page markup is invalid this will result in unpredictable and possibly incomplete presentation.
• Use percentage and relative measures such as em, ex, bolder, larger and thick.

(more…)

In discussing the limitations of mobile devices for delivery of Web content it is easy to lose sight of the fact that they are extremely popular and very common.

This popularity largely stems at present from them being:

• personal
• personalizable
• portable
• connected
• and increasingly multi-functional beyond their original purpose of voice communications.

In addition to these factors, the advantages of mobile devices will increasingly
include:

• location awareness
• one-handed operation
• always on
• universal alerting device

By way of illustration of some of these factors: the Web can go where you go. You do not have to remember to do something on the Web when you get back to your computer. You can do it immediately, within the context that made you want to use the Web in the first place.

Moreover, with mobile devices appearing in all shapes and forms, and with a growing variety of features like location technology, cameras, voice recognition, touch screens etc, the Web can reach a much wider audience, and at all times in all situations. It has the opportunity to reach into places where wires cannot go, to places previously unthinkable (e.g. providing medical info to mountain rescue scenes) and to accompany everyone as easily as they carry the time on their wristwatches.

Finally, today, many more people have access to mobile devices than access to a desktop computer. This is likely to be very significant in developing countries, where Web-capable mobile devices may play as similar a role in deploying wide-spread Web access as the mobile phone has played for providing “plain old telephone service”.

• Accessible Web Authoring Resources & Education
• RNIB web access centre – Web accessibility resources from techniques through to advice.
• Accessify.com – Collection of free online tools to improve accessibility.
• Visionary Design – National Library for the Blind.

We mean by this that desinged and built the correct way, any document that is published on the web can work across multiple browsers, platforms, and internet devices – and will continue to work as new browsers and devices are invented. Open standards make this possible.

As an added attraction, designing and building with web standards lowers production and maintenance costs while making sites more accessible to those who have special needs.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international consortium of companies involved with the Internet and the Web.

The W3C was founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the original architect of the World Wide Web. The organization’s purpose is to develop open standards so that the Web evolves in a single direction rather than being splintered among competing factions.

Specifications developed by the W3C include HTML, CSS, XML, XHTML, and the document object model (DOM), among many others.