How do you order similar keywords when writing content?

[rball1]

Let's say I sell widgets: plastic widgets, paper widgets, brass widgets and steel widgets.

These are in order by how popular they are but none is so popular to really stand on it's own.

When writing general content about widgets, lets say for the main Widgets page, would you write:

1. "We sell plastic, paper, brass and steel widgets."

-or-

2. "We sell plastic widgets, paper widgets, brass widgets and steel widgets."

I understand I can have specific pages for Plastic Widgets, Paper Widgets, etc., but like I said this would be for a main category page, maybe even for a quick "this is what we do" opening paragraph on the homepage.

Is it better to be concise like in example 1? Or to individually call out each type like in example 2?

I'm looking for SEO insight and the customer experience viewpoint as well.

[EGOL]

I always write the way that I would talk or the way that I would write if the article would be in print instead of on the web.

The best way to turn a great article into a good article is trying to write it for search engines or try to hit a specific wordcount.

[RyanKent]

I'm looking for SEO insight and the customer experience viewpoint as well.

Ideally these are the same. Practically we aren't there yet, but you should design your site for the customer experience and for the most part you will do very well with respect to SEO.

Your second example seems spammy to me. I would suggest finding a way to naturally write the content. Write your content then ask an English teacher to grade it. I am quite serious.

The rules we learned in school: tell your audience what you are going to talk about (page title, meta description, H1 tag) then talk about it (content with keyword usage a few times) then tell them what you talked about (a summary which often is not relevant to short sales content).

I would also recommend using your keyword as early as possible in your content. "Widgets are available in many styles: plastic, paper, brass and steel."

[rhutchings]

I also think it needs to be more like the first example.  The SE are trying to move towards a more natural language recognition, and i would write in that manner.  Remember too that you can utilize punctuation to split keywords up.  For example:

"Many buyers prefer plastic widgets or paper widgets. Steel and brass widget are increasingly popular..."  This would still hit all the keywords without seeming too spammy.  Notice that the period here grammatically give a break to your content, but google will see the "widgets. Steel" together sometime, ignore the period and recognize it as "widgets steel", and then interpret that as the same as "steel widgets".

Just another small copy writing trick.

[rball1]

Spammy is what I want to avoid, but it unfortunately works in regards to SEO. Like you said, "Practically we aren't there yet."

I really like your suggestion of asking an English teacher to grade it. I'm having visions of every English teacher I ever had looking over my shoulder as I write now, kind of like Jedi masters of copy.

[rball1]

Nice tip, thanks for sharing!