In the first part of this blog, we learned about four key things you can do to turn your copy into traffic or sales. In the second part of this two-part blog, we will finish up and look at five more keys to helping you earn more sales!

#5 – …And Hit the Target “Blind”
Nine times out of ten you’ll find that the copy is already near-perfect for your purpose anyway. After all, Google is designed specifically to define relevance as what people want to read.

They’re not big fans of SEO designed to capture people by keyword tweaking and are always harping on writing naturally. That means that the words that would occur to a writer discussing a topic and those a potential reader uses to find them are likely to match pretty well spontaneously. Often, no special effort is needed.

# 6 – Play the Odds
Suppose you’ve written an article stating how fine a thing is the Gibson acoustic guitar. You’re likely to use those last three words somewhere in the first paragraph without any special thought towards SEO.

Now suppose someone wants to buy one. What are they likely to type in? Odds are high it will be something containing “Gibson acoustic guitar.” Their research goals, directed by their purchase desire, will drive their keyword use.

(That doesn’t guarantee you high ranking, or getting found, of course. Keyword optimized copy is important in SEO, but it’s not the end of the story.)

# 7 – Confirm and Re-write
You’ll want to check and confirm the utility and quality of your keywords and your  content. Do some searches yourself to see what comes up. Use Wordtracker, Yahoo!, or your favorite tool to verify the content in your copy. Find out how often someone really would use the keywords you included.

With that in hand you can go back through your copy — whether it’s an article, sales letter, home page intro material, or whatever — and see if the words you use really do match. It’s much easier to modify existing text to swap out a word here or there once you already have something.

Substituting a spider-tasty synonym for the word you used that means the same thing (but wouldn’t work quite as well) is easy now. Go through the first 200 words to ensure that the keywords that are in heavy use related to that topic really are in your copy. If not, swap one out of your text that means the same thing and pop in the new one.

# 8 – Check It For Sense
When you’re done with that stage, read it over to make sure it still makes sense from a human point of view. You have to attract visitors, but you don’t want to drive them away with senseless sentences once they get there.

Do the same exercise with the rest of the copy. While it’s true that search engines focus heavily on the first sentences, paragraph, and/or 200 words or so, that’s not all they check.

Spider designers are devilishly clever. They sometimes check the last paragraph as well. From both the search engine and the real reader’s points of view, the copy has to read well throughout. You don’t want to lose either at the end. After all, that’s often where you’ll tip the undecided into a sale.

# 9 – Test, Test, Test
Don’t regard your copy as ever “finished.” It may read well today, and that will last you for a while. But six months or a year later, things will have changed. Different products require a different focus, even when the copy is general enough to cover them all.

Consumer tastes change, both in products and the way they want to find out about them. A fresh phrase today is a tired cliché a year later.

The only way to know for sure whether your copy is still effective from a keyword perspective is to observe the results. Monitor the traffic, put up different pages on the same topic with slightly different wording and note the difference. It’s a never-ending effort to keep those visitors coming, and coming back.

But the reward is never-ending sales.