Content is necessary for your website to rank on search engines. Studies also show that content is the king! But creating high-quality content might be time-consuming and hard especially if you don’t have any previous experience with writing content.
Here, I will be sharing with you best practices as you develop your content.
SEO Writing Tips to Make Your Content Go Further
Write for your audience first
This SEO writing tip is number one for a reason. It seems easy enough, yet so many companies make content for all the wrong reasons. Write content that appeals to the interests of your target market or answers their questions. Not all posts need to be about your product or service, but they all should be industry related. Assert yourself and your company as an expert in your industry by writing SEO-friendly content that is interesting and informative, and do it better than your competition.
Keep it all under the same roof
Get the credit and traffic your website deserves by keeping your original content under your own domain name. That means if you have a blog opt out of hosting with WordPress or Blogger and host the blog in a subfolder on your own domain (ie: www.example.com/blog ). Any time you have an opportunity to showcase other forms of original content like videos, infographics or whitepapers, make sure to also embed them onto your website as well and share from there.
Make headlines that pack a punch
You have a very short amount of text to make a very big impression. So don’t underestimate the power of an effective headline on SEO! Write headlines that are clear, interesting and make use of rich keywords. In addition to a great headline, also make sure your meta descriptions are interesting and further elaborate on the topic of your article. Keep in mind that your title and meta description are what show up in the search results, so make them count!
Use keyword-rich phrases
Use relevant, keyword rich phrases in your headlines as well as throughout your content to let both your readers and the search engines know what your post is about. But beware, too many keywords will not only turn off your readers but can result in search engine penalties for keyword stuffing. Use keywords thoughtfully and sparingly, sticking to a more natural feel. In addition to using keywords throughout the body of your post, take advantage blog tags by tagging a few relevant keywords for each post; most general blogs have tagging capabilities already built in.
Structure your posts
The contents of your post may be great but can be easily lost in an unorganized, inefficient format. Breaking your content up into smaller paragraphs with headlines makes for an easy read that will keep your readers engaged. For the search engines, back-end organization is key too. Using proper tag hierarchy when tagging headlines (H1 for titles, H2 for subtitles) is important to maintain a well-structured article.
Incorporate imagery
Make your posts pop with images! People are visual. Adding an image along with your blog post can make a big impression. Have a Pinterest account? In addition to promoting your blogs across your other social media channels, posts with images can also be pinned, adding another avenue for traffic to your website.
Include a keyword phrase in your title
Amusing and witty tiles might be fun to write, but titles with keyword phrases bring in the bucks. A huge goal in your content writing should be to write for Google and its algorithms. With over 5 billion searches done each day, it is the most popular search engine on the Internet. Google gives heavier weight to the title of articles and blog posts. Including keyword phrases in your titles is thus an easy but effective way to create content writing that ranks higher in search engines.
While we are on the subject of titles, try to use lists and odd numbers in your title to grab the attention of users. It isn’t a coincidence that this article has 7 tips.
Use and bold the keyword within the first sentence
The very first sentence on your blog or other content writing should include the keyword phrase either in the form of a statement or a question. Additionally, bold the entirety of the keyword phrase. When Google and other search engines scan or “crawl” your site, they will give extra weight and priority to bold words and phrases. Google will also give extra weight to italicized words.
Do NOT keyword stuff
Keywords and keyword phrases are most effective when they are used once every 125 to 150 words. Keyword stuffing gives off a poor and awkward impression of your writing skills.This can make the content writing unappealing to the reader. Additionally, when Google crawling registers an excess of keywords and keyword phrases it will often register the article as spam and negatively impact the business’s search engine rankings.
Make it evergreen content
Evergreen content is quality content that is in-depth and perpetually relevant. Social SEO – improving a website’s visibility in search engines via social media – is becoming increasingly more important to content writing. Your content should engage your audience and remain relevant long after its first online publication. This will make it more apt to be shared or otherwise promoted by readers, improving a site’s SEO in a more viral and grassroots way.
Target geo-specific key phrases
Because online markets are becoming increasingly crowed, it is important to specialize to stand out amongst the crowd. If your client serves a specific geographic area, make sure you use geo-specific key phrases in your content writing. Prospective customers are specific in their online searching, and will often want a provider that can offer a product or service near or at their location.
Call it a banana, not an elongated yellow fruit
You are not writing the next great American novel; you are writing content that is interesting, engaging, and sells a product or service. Avoid using verbose phrases and complex words. Instead, use plenty of short action verbs and throw around a few popular industry buzz terms to spice your writing up.
Use plenty of linkage
Just as with bolding and italicizing, Google search engines give extra weight to keywords and keyword phrases that include a clickable link. Use hyperlinks to related articles and products offered by your client, or use links to industry references. A great place to include this at the beginning or end of your article. Closing out with a call-to-action and a link your client’s contact page is a great SEO strategy.
Monitor your activity
Stay on top of your SEO friendly content by monitoring your efforts. Google Analytics is an easy and free way to track your page views and the average time spent on a page. Check things like your bounce rate and time on site to get an idea of how users interact with your website after landing on your content. If you see a high drop off in addition to a low average time spent on the page, that’s an indication that your content wasn’t relevant to what they were looking for, or worse, wasn’t interesting. Also, take a look at the number of social interactions (shares, likes, etc ) to get an idea of the virality of your post. Just looking at these simple metrics can give you a good idea of which content pieces are well-received and liked so that you can replicate that type of content down the road.
Propel content with social media
Social media is a powerful tool that can help increase the reach of your content and promote sharing. Post each new article on social media sites and in forums, using engaging descriptions and a call-to-action. Since the power of social media lies in sharing, it’s also important to have share buttons on each of your blog posts. If you want more control of how your links appear when they’re shared, implementing Twitter Cards for Twitter or Open Graph for Facebook (technical) can give your shared links a boost, and may help your click-through rates.
Implement Google Authorship
Google Authorship is a quick and easy way to tie content to a certain author, all you need is a Google+ account. As a result, your articles come up as rich snippets in the search results featuring the author’s photo along with the article title. Google Authorship is great for personal promotion, but can also increase the click through rate to your articles. If you’re an author, learn how to set up Authorship for your website.
Promote natural link building
Link building has come a long way since the days of link buying and link farms, but links are still an important ranking factor for SEO. Linking to your own articles or website in your post ensures a link back to your website if your article is picked up by another site. If you get creative with other types of content like infographics and videos, adding an embed code on your site helps to promote content sharing and also adds a link back to the original source. Creating great content helps increase the sharability and the likelihood that other websites will link to it, so aim for quality!
Conclusion
SEO content writing was a challenge for many people in the past, but with the popularity of Google Panda and Penguin it became a real nightmare for webmasters. Google content guidelines have been updated frequently over the last few years, and that means that your seo content should be updated accordingly.