Is SEO copywriting denting your credibility?

After refreshing my web site recently I've been taking time out to brush up on search engine optimisation (SEO) skills. These are the techniques you can use to push your web site up to the top of search engine rankings. Find a phrase that describes your business accurately, that is regularly used in searches, but that few competitors have on their web sites, build it into your web copy, and theoretically you’re away.

While I was researching the terms competitors use, I found a copywriting business that was way up the Google rankings. Keen to find out how they’ve achieved that, I clicked on the link, and arrived at a landing page full of nonsense. Sentence after sentence had been put together simply to include a key phrase, so I was reading stuff like:

"Get a copywriter experience freelance quote. Get a quote for copywriter experience freelance. Search engine optimization copywriter experience freelance or search engine optimisation experience freelance can be found here. If you need an inexpensive copywriter experience freelance then get in touch today."

As the page was part of the full web site, it was easy to navigate to the intelligible pages and findout what this business was really all about, and the SEO copywriting services it was offering.

I was torn. Was this immensely clever, because it had achieved a high ranking, and demonstration that this SEO copywriting business could do the same for customers? Or was it just appalling because the first contact a customer has with this firm is garbage?

Actually an approach like this might be clever, but it’s surely got to dent the credibility of the firm that’s using it. The art of SEO copywriting is to slip those keywords into the content of the home page and throughout the web site, without detracting from the site’s key purpose – to inform the customer and make the sale. So my verdict is – clever, quite amusing, but definitely a no, no.