• By Jimmy Cox
• Published 10/29/2009
• Article Writing

Here’s a quick SEO copywriting tip involving headlines. In the headline you obviously need the SEO keywords because that is what they’re already tuned to and looking for, but then you want to intrigue the reader further. When you type in a keyword into a search engine, you quickly scan over the page. You don’t read it word for word. Whatever grabs your attention will win. Firstly, the SEO keyword and then you want something that hooks the reader. ‘How to’ is a good one. Let’s say the keyword was dog’s health. We could say ‘How to Improve your Dog’s Health’ or, if the keyword was tomatoes, ‘How to Grow Tomatoes’. ‘How to’ is not applicable to wine supplies, but if I’m typing in growing tomatoes, chances are I want to know how to do it or I want to know more about it. That’s why SEO keywords are so important because they are what the user is typing in. They give us an idea of what the problem is they’re trying to solve. People who are using search engines are coming with a problem and searching for a solution to that problem.

We have to think how can we serve up that solution and make it as attractive as possible. The person who types in ‘wine supplies’ might be

, for example, a cashed up person who wants to set up a wine cellar downstairs, so they’re looking for wine supplies to fit out their wine cellar.A good way to start is get a picture in your head of what sort of person doing the search. Now you can write keeping their goals in mind. You might write ‘Wine Supplies: Tips and Tricks’ or ‘The Best Wine Supplies’. A good way to do this is to go to Amazon, type in the keyword and take headlines from the book covers that come up. Amazon is not dumb. Amazon ranks them on what book is selling the best. Everyone says “Don’t judge a book by its cover”, but that is what people are doing when they go into a bookstore. They judge a book by the title or the cover. The cover grabs their attention. Amazon will rank based on what is grabbing people’s attention. The best place to start for headlines for anything, be it articles, optimization, anything, go to Amazon, type in the primary keyword and rip out the headline. Make sure when using SEO keywords, they are put into the title tag of your page.

You want to try and do between three and five secondary keywords. You wouldn’t want to do more than that because Google only displays a certain amount of words. So you wouldn’t want to use a whole lot of words that are not going to be displayed in the search results.