How to write for SEO
There was a time when optimizing a specific content for the search engine was much simpler than it is today. All one needed to do was to have some words paired together with certain specific targeted keywords used for a definite percentage over the whole content and have a few words that link to the targeted pages. However, even though such SEO attempts were easier, they were eventually deemed worthless on a larger scale.
Nowadays the whole process of SEO has become much more comprehensive and a tad more complicated than just working with simple formulas. SEO companies hire professional writers for their content development projects and they can create a wide range of high quality contents that are optimized by carefully selected keywords.
In order to create top quality content that can appeal to the target customers, there are a number of rules and concepts that you can follow. This will help you to come up with content that can work well for the various search engines and appeal to your customers. The following tips will help you in your content creation goals.
Have a whole new perspective
The first thing that you need to do while coming up with fresh, new, high quality content is to have a new perspective while creating the same. By changing your perspective, you can get inside the mindset of your target audience and understand the type of content that they would find most appealing.
While you may have a highly successful business that you are proud of and you want to communicate to the world its central message, your content will never be able to create the best impression unless it is written by keeping in mind the needs of the target audience. By looking at things from the point of view of your customers, you can understand their needs and explain to them how your content can be helpful to them. Remember, your content must fulfill a certain function.
It must solve a problem or present with a solution to your customers so that they can find it helpful. Instead of showing to them how great your business is, you should focus on what your company can do for them. By focusing on what they can get from you, you can encourage them to invest with your business. Your content must be written in a way that explains the value your target customers are likely to get from your business. This is going to get them interested in what you have to offer.
Keywords vs. Relationships vs. Topics
At one point of time, “keyword density” really had a lot of importance when it came to the creation of SEO content. In fact, many people considered “keyword density” as the main pillar of success when it came to SEO content creation. It is due to this reason that SEO specialists put a lot of emphasis on finding out the keywords that would be most profitable for a specific piece of content. They also focused on the number of times a particular keyword would appear on a page and the words that would be included in a link.
The truth is that even though these things do have a role to play, they should never be considered as the first priority while creating the content for a project. The meaning and purpose of keywords have changed greatly over the years and even though they are important, they do not signify the same meaning as before. Moreover, the formula for using them is also not clearly defined. The main purpose of using keywords these days is to guide the writers about the topics that they are writing on.
However, there are still some guidelines that are worth noting. For instance, the writers should use the specific keyword at least once in the title, once in a subtitle as well as once or twice while writing the main body of the content. It is extremely important for a writer to remember that Google can easily detect the keyword placement strategy adopted by the SEO Company. So if the writer is putting the keywords in some specific places only because he or she is supposed to, Google can easily understand such a behavior. While Google is not going to penalize a site for it, it is still not going to offer the best rankings for that site either.
On the other hand, it always pays off to merely consider the keywords mainly as a guiding principle while creating content for a specific topic. This is so because Google not only considers the usage of the keywords but also the overall functionality and importance of the content itself. They’re also considering the keyword support for the topic as well. You can easily detect this in the search results for numerous common search entries.
For instance, let’s say that a person searched for “Italian leather.”
This will provide you with a map of all the stores within a locality that can offer you goods made of Italian leather, a side box offering the best of Italian leather products and also numerous results that present you with the “best Italian leather goods stores” in the area.
You may also find something that appears something like this:
Best Italian leather goods
Italian leather shoes, Italian leather belts, Italian leather jackets, Italian leather wallets, Italian leather bags
Have a closer look at all the terms in the following description that was put in bold by Google.
At one point of time, the only words that were bolded by Google in such a description were the ones that users specifically searched for.
However, nowadays Google also bolds the other words as it detects the relationship between the searched words and the related items.
Therefore you do not have to bother about using each and every possible form of the target keyword while creating the content.
On the other hand, you should focus on coming up with content which properly covers all the finer aspects of the topic while using all the relevant support words in the best possible manner.
Keep the readers perfectly glued on the page
One of the most crucial aspects of an SEO campaign is the total time that a visitor chooses to spend in a specific page while in a website. This can have a major impact on how it ranks in search engines. It also impacts the decision of the visitors to invest in the products and services that the website has to offer.
Therefore it is extremely important that you have to keep your readers interested enough so that they keep on reading your content. For instance, you can use lists, bullet points and subheadings to break your content into smaller subsections as it can help you to keep your readers engaged. These methods have been in use for quite a long time and they are still considered extremely useful. However, you can do even more with your content.
There are certain websites that offer valuable information on something called “Bucket Brigades.”
The “Bucket Brigades” can be defined as some form of old school copywriting method that was designed originally for keeping the visitors reading the sales letters. You can also interpret them as tools that keep the readers engaged by offering them something more. Such tools work as questions or lead-in sentences that encourage the audience to keep on reading. They are often following by colon and offer something interesting for the audience to explore.
Plenty of professional writers use such methods to create blogs and articles. However, you need to remember that such pieces of content almost often feel like infomercials or commercials. So if you are looking to create a content that is only meant to offer information instead of selling anything, you should ideally refrain from using such methods of writing a content. One of the best ways of creating content is to keep in mind the needs of the audience. You should focus on offering value to the customers and then leave all the purchasing decisions in their hands. When you create a valuable content for them, they are likely to base their purchasing decisions on such content.
There are also plenty of other ways as well that you can use to hold on to your audience and make them stay in your website for longer durations. Some of these ways are discussed below.
Supplemental Content
Supplemental Content is something that you do not often hear being talked about. Nevertheless Google recognizes that this form of content can really translate into good user experience, thereby making it integral aspect of “high quality pages.” When you improve the quality of a page, it is automatically rewarded by better ranking.
So what is the meaning of supplemental content?
A supplemental content can be defined as a feature that is created to help the users navigate through the website and explore other components of a website which can be some other content or blog, a different product or some other downloadable component or file.
You have to keep in mind that this is not simply about offering links to some of your other articles.
The supplemental content that you create should not only be helpful but it should also be relevant enough to the purpose and content of the page. It should always offer users something meaningful.
As a content marketer, you can take hints from YouTube that extensively makes use of supplemental content in most of its pages.
Users regularly browse through YouTube for finding the next video. This always keeps them on site, leading them to explore everything that they can.
However, you must also be careful about the way that you can use it. Make sure that you refrain from using too much of supplemental content since it can force your users to deem your site as useless. You should use supplemental content in such a way that it never seems distracting to your target users. Keep in mind that any content that seems to be distracting or disturbing to the users do not fare well with Google when it comes to search engine ranking.
Writing for audience of a specific level
While writing content for your website, one of the things that you will often hear is about is to maintain the reading level of the content close to that of an 8th grade student.
The readability of a content is very important as your readers won’t feel bothered to go through complex characters. While it is true that the difficulty level of a content is really subjective, it is always good to keep the content easy and simple.
While such measures work as good tools and be extremely helpful in determining the direction of the content, there are still certain things that you need to keep in mind.
For instance, if you believe that this guideline can serve as a guiding principle for you when you are looking to create all kinds of content for your project, you are once again trying to find formulas that can help you to resolve all your problems magically.
For instance, let’s say that the industry that your business is a part of comes up with different types of complex software products and solutions to the other companies that are involved in developing even more technically complicated tools. In such cases, it is safe to assume that the people who will go through the content related to such business activities are going to expect a complex form of content that categorically belong to a higher level of understanding and comprehension.
Therefore even if you maintain the readability of your content to that of 8th grade standard, it may not really help your audience provided the writing style is too simplistic for the general reading level of your audience.
Therefore you need to keep in mind the general readability of your site’s content if you are looking to get the best SEO results. To achieve this goal, you must take into consideration your audience as well as the needs of the search engine.
Ask and provide answers to important questions
While you may feel that you know everything about the questions that are asked by your target customers, you may actually just focusing on the things that you want your potential customers to ask about your business.
• Why does it take a long time to do SEO for a website?
• Why content is so much important for an SEO campaign?
• How can the domain name impact the results of the SEO campaign?
These are simply some of the questions that people often ask when it comes to SEO. Since we have been dealing with SEO projects for a long time, we are totally familiar with the needs of the target customers and the type of questions that they ask.
On the other hand, there can be a lot of questions that we want our audience to ask us. However, more often than not we do not get such queries and there seems to be not much people who actually understand the importance of asking such questions to us. In case you are looking to create content that offer answers to such queries, it is extremely important that you create answers that are precise and to the point. This will help you to engage the audience in a better way and provide them with something that will encourage them to spend longer durations of time in the website. The content should not come off as irrelevant as it would then seem like a desperate effort to retain your website visitors.
SEO writing is simply not just about making use of specific words to obtain better rankings
It is extremely important to produce content that elevates your online ranking. Moreover, you should focus on coming up with content that can convert your site’s visitors to purchase the products and services that you have to offer.
Whether you are dealing with creating content or boosting your conversion rates, you must remember there is a little bit of SEO in everything that you do. The overall time spent on site as well as the total numbers of click-throughs along with level of engagement and conversions can impact your search engine rankings in a major way.
It is such things that you should target while you write for SEO.
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