Which comes first the words or the music? Or in our case, when do we think about keywords - before we start writing or afterwards by making adjustments?

And do keywords actually matter at all any more?

Andy

I tend to write from a completely blank page, then compile a keyword list and see how the 2 fit together. The right keywords are often the ones that it feels most natural to use and it can be little things like plural rather than singular that make the difference.

I keep saying that the main thing with writing for online is dropping that fear of word repetition that every PR / journalist has - now remember, repetition is good! It's actually quite nice to write in such a straightforward way.

Where I used to work we had a ban on tabloid-ese, copy had to pass what we called the Britney Spears test. Meaning, no "the pop princess said..." or "the American singer blah blah..." - just say what you mean.

I've just discovered that Japanese has some added difficulties in allowing repetitions, of company names for example.

Traditionally in the UK it's bad form to keep repeating, but that can be ignored when writing for search engines. In Japanese it's not just inadvisable, but actually wrong to do that and correct to use descriptive terms and synonyms instead.

I don't know if the search engine algorithmns in Japan take this into account? (It possibly affects news search rather more than general search).