Well-Written SEO Copy?

Is it possible to write persuasive copy that also gets you noticed in search engines? Of course. Is it worth doing? Absolutely. Are large SEM firms routinely providing this to clients? Uh, no.

I'm thinking of one company in particular, one of the biggest players in the industry, who seems to take a "path of least resistance" approach to SEO copy. This means they find a few good keywords in Wordtracker, jam them into collections of words that might be called sentences, and call it a day. Here is a one sentence sample, currently live on the web:

Is your living room shaped where it's hard to fit a lot of furniture in it?

Some of you are thinking that sentence doesn't look too bad. You may stop reading now. For the rest of you (if there are any), my point is this--good writing should always trump jamming keywords into sentences. Don't let SEM firms write copy for you unless they have demonstrated that they actually understand what good copywriting is.