Tag Archives: seo writing

How to make your content unique, engaging and high-quality

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With more and more Google updates penalizing websites for the way they publish content and aggregate incoming links, it has become necessary to carry out a thorough website content assessment to make sure that your website doesn’t lose its rankings.

Your website content, as the latest Google guidelines state, must be prepared with your user in mind and not the search engines. Actually, it makes more sense. When you’re creating content for search engines, knowingly or unknowingly, you end up trying to manipulate your content. On the other hand if you just focus on your users, if you create your website content totally for your users, you focus more on quality and communication.

Why in the first place you create website content?

If you are creating content for your business website you want people to do business with you. Why would they do business with you? If, through your content, you can persuade them, you can make them believe in what you are saying and you can instil a sense of trust in them, they will do business with you. For that you have to provide them with as much information as possible. The information must be clear, to the point and devoid of misrepresentation. Every bit of important information should be available within 2-3 clicks.

You create content on your website to tell them about the benefits of your product or service. You use different pages to talk about your company, your skills, your offerings, and the people who work in your organization. You also talk about all the activities you participate in as an organization as well as as an individual. The entire idea of creating content for your website is to provide engaging, useful information so that your visitors can make an educated decision.

Ensuring high-quality and unique content

Every business is unique. You cannot possibly be an exact copy of another business. Even though there are 100s of search engines out there, you can easily distinguish between Google and Bing. Similarly, there are multiple social networking platforms but still you can easily differentiate between Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.

In the same vein, although there might be many business similar to what you are doing, your offering in some way or another will be unique. This gives you an opportunity to create unique content. It is totally centered around your online presence. It will be catering to your audience.

And now we come to high quality. Here is a nice blog post on how to ensure error-free high quality website content. The basic tenets are universal. Before publishing content just check the following:

  • You ensure that all the information is accurate
  • If you are using factual information back it up with either the original source or multiple sources quoting the same piece of information
  • Make sure there are no spelling mistakes and grammatical errors
  • The structure of your content is in such a manner that your visitors can easily follow it
  • Question yourself whether you actually need the content you are preparing to make sure you are not simply preparing your content in order to attract search engines
  • Provide a human-friendly site map that people can easily access from your main page
  • Make your content as relevant to your business as possible
  • Make it as useful to your visitors as possible

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How come targeted content improves your search engine rankings?

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If you ask me SEO content is actually targeted content, and if you are wondering what is targeted content it is content specifically generated for a particular audience using particular keywords (and that’s what makes it SEO content). Purely SEO content doesn’t do you much good because even if it generates lots of traffic it doesn’t generate much business because it doesn’t move your visitors. Targeted content on the other hand not only draws qualified traffic from various search engines it also improves your conversion rate.

A couple of weeks ago I removed a package that I had started offering from my website. I had collaborated with a writer (a content provider, actually, who hires writers to generate bulk content) to provide low-cost, average-quality content that could help clients improve their search engine rankings. I started offering this package because I was getting lots of queries from India and I also got contacted by a few writers who were ready to generate lots of content at very low rates. This worked for a while but then I felt it was counterproductive for my clients and also for my own business.

I am not a very well-known copywriter on the Internet but over the past five years I have managed to eke out a presence through providing quality content persistently. Since there are very few people who understand the difference between cost and value a majority of clients confused that package with the overall content writing services that I provide.

They somehow got themselves into believing that they could pay dirt cheap and still they should be able to use that content as primary business content.

Content purely written for SEO rarely performs well as primary business content and if you want primary business content then you must pay accordingly. Anyway, it is very difficult to explain to clients once they have seen the rates. Instead of wasting my time again and again trying to explain the difference between quality content and low-cost SEO your content I stopped offering that package altogether.

Instead, I insist — even if they have to pay a bit more — that they should aim at producing highly targeted content. They may end up with less content than what they could have gotten by paying a lower rate, performance wise this content is much better.

But how does targeted content improve your search engine rankings?

In order to produce targeted content you need to be clear about two things, in fact three things:

  • What exactly you want to convey
  • To whom you want to convey
  • What words you want to use

Once you have sorted out these questions you are more than halfway through producing high-quality SEO content that can also be used as your primary business content. When you write content keeping your audience in mind you are careful about what you’re writing and how you are writing. When you know what you want to convey you stick to the topic and stay away from ambivalence. The words that you want to use while creating your content are your keywords and the search terms you want to target.

Although you should arrange your content so that it is more convenient for the search engine crawlers to go through it and assess it, your primary focus must always be your visitors, your readers. Search engines are not going to do business with you but people will.

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SEO Content writing actually improves your search engine rankings

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SEO content as an expression has been gaining traction gradually, as more and more organizations and content creators realize that it doesn’t merely mean putting keywords here and there and then fretting over their density compared to the overall content. What do millions of Internet users access everyday while surfing the Internet? They access the content present on various websites? What do people promote day in and day out on various social media and networking websites? They promote content links. So it’s clear it’s everything about content, whether it exists in the form of text, video or images.

Since everybody is seeking content, how do you create content that’s actually being sought? And if you create content that is highly sought after, how do you let people know of its existence? This is where SEO content writing can help you. Whether people are using search engines, online directories or social networking websites to dig out relevant information, one thing is common that they use: the keywords, the search terms. There are many Internet “gurus” that say SEO is fast becoming irrelevant because less and less people are using search engines and more and more people are using social media and social networking websites to retrieve information that can help them make informed purchasing decisions. It’s true to a great extent, but from where do those social media and social networking websites get that information that is later on “found” by their users? Right. From websites and blogs.

SEO content writing is not just about outsmarting the search engines. It’s about talking in the right language and using the right words; words people actually use. If I’m writing about SEO content writing, and if nowhere on my page this phrase appears (let’s say all the time I’m talking about getting more search engine traffic — a good thing to do actually, but here I’m just explaining the expressions and their relevance) how can the search engines find my page when people are looking for SEO content writing?

So it’s very important that you figure out:

  • What’s your target market
  • What search terms and expressions they actually use
  • What they’re actually looking for
  • How to incorporate the data into your entire SEO content writing process

How does it help you improve your search engine rankings

A lot of your success on the Internet depends on getting found, if you don’t have millions of dollars to spend on advertising. Search engine optimization is definitely a good start and when you include keyword targeting in your overall SEO content writing strategy it helps the search engine ranking algorithms compute the relevancy according to the searches being conducted. It has a circular effect:

SEO Content Writing

As you can see in the diagram, with the right start, one thing leads to another and it goes on and on.

But is it this simple? Of course its not.

SEO content writing has to be matched with relevancy — it must provide solutions and answers. Suppose someone wants to know what smart phone she should buy? Simply optimizing your content for iPhone or Nexus One or BlackBerry isn’t going to be of much help and if it isn’t going to be of much help people are neither going to link to it nor going to promote it. Unless your content really helps her decide, it’s of no relevance, and even if it appears on the first pages of various search engines (flukes do happen), it neither benefits you nor your visitors.

Create few SEO content pages, but create highly relevant pages. This is where everything begins. If you start focusing on every keyword under the sun and start generating tons of directionless traffic it’s not going to benefit you, and you’ll end up concluding that SEO content writing doesn’t work. Instead, focus on a few search terms and create highly relevant content around them. Just in a couple of months you’ll notice a marked difference.

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SEO copywriting – what it really means

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I was just going through this interesting blog post titled SEO Copywriting is dead! Here’s Proof…. I often come across articles and blog posts bashing up terminologies and work-related phrases. For instance recently I came across a report that tried to prove that outsourcing could be disastrous for your work, despite the fact that more and more work is being outsourced to save time and money. Anyway, since I provide SEO copywriting services I thought I should write a quick post on what SEO copywriting actually means and what are its benefits.

So what exactly is SEO copywriting?

It is definitely not repeating keywords and key phrases umpteen times, as many clients mistakenly understand. As I’ve previous explained in a blog post titled SEO tips you should know as an online copywriter, every well-written copy that properly handles the topic can qualify as an SEO copy.

Keywords? Yes, they are important, and if you totally ignore them in your copy, then definitely the search engines are going to find it difficult to rank it well for those keywords. For example, if I want to optimize this blog post for SEO copywriting, but I write about SEO content writing and SEO writing, then definitely the search engines will not show this blog post when people search for SEO copywriting. That is why it is very important that when you’re writing about a subject on a particular page or blog post, stick to it. If I want to get traffic for SEO copywriting, then I should better focus on this particular phrase, rather than trying to be esoteric and cryptic.

SEO copywriting involves writing the copy in such a manner that it judiciously talks about the subject, while taking care that the keyword or the key phrase appears sufficient number of times, at appropriate places, without sounding silly or repetitive. There is no point getting the first position on Google by creating content that means nothing to your visitors.

Does SEO copywriting improve your search engine rankings?

It definitely should. Even if you don’t immediately improve your search engine rankings (it depends on lots of factors, not just the copy), it is a step in the right direction. It’s like, if you require n steps to reach B from A, then a well-written page by an experienced SEO copywriter definitely makes the number of needed steps n-1.

Does SEO copywriting improve your conversion rate?

The underlying rationale behind every copywriting exercise, ultimately, is to improve your conversion rate. Your search engine rankings shouldn’t be improved at the cost of your conversion rate. In fact this is why good SEO copywriters are in such a great demand: they are copywriters in the conventional sense, and they also create you copy that improves your search engine rankings.

SEO copywriting may not bring you instant results, but it is indisputably the focal point of your SEO effort. Nothing precedes it. No amount of tweaking and hacking is going to give you lasting results. Once you obtain decent rankings through proper, legitimate SEO copywriting, no amount of search engine algorithmic changes are going to be able to take that away from you.

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How to write SEO text

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You want to know how to write SEO text to improve your search engine rankings, most probably. When you are writing for the web, it’s not just the human readers who are going to read, evaluate and then act upon whatever you have published, even the various search engines are going to evaluate your text and rank it accordingly. Although the search engine companies like Google are constantly trying to mimic the human psyche as closely as possible there subtle differences in the ways that humans and the search engine algorithms make sense of your text. If you want to learn how to write SEO text you should also spend some time understanding how the search engine crawlers access your individual pages and how those pages are ranked according to keywords and other, longer expressions present on your webpage.

Although there are many SEO experts who say that words don’t matter but they really do. Ever since we started using language to communicate words have been an integral, inseparable part of language. So in order to convey something you have to be careful about your words. For instance if you want to tell somebody, I love you, you don’t say I have the extremely opposite feeling of hatred for you. The search engines are going to think that you’re talking about hatred and not love. So if you want to learn how to write SEO you must also learn to use the right words to say something. Aside from that here are a few pointers that can lead you towards writing effective SEO text.

Make a list of the keywords that you’re going to use in the SEO text of the current page

The keywords of course must be context specific. Before preparing the text you should prepare a list of keywords and expressions that you would like to highlight on the page. Try to use these keywords while forming your sentences. Writing SEO text doesn’t meaning filling up your webpage with nonsensical repetitions. Don’t overdo it and stick to relevance. Recently I read that you should use your keyword in the first sentence of the first paragraph, in the last sentence of the first paragraph, once in every paragraph, and then once in the last sentence of the last paragraph. I don’t think all this is necessary, just use your keywords whenever you think they should appear justifiably. Use them in your headings and subheadings, bulleted lists and in anchor text. The moot point is that you have to convince the search engine algorithms that you are seriously talking about the keyword on your page.

Put your keywords in the title of your page

The title of your page is very important because it tells the search engines what your page contains. Although there is no harm in creating esoteric titles it helps a lot if your title contains the expression for which you want to be ranked higher on the search engine results pages. Various studies have revealed that search engine users have a greater tendency to click on the hyperlinks that contain the expressions they have just used to conduct the search. The title of your webpage appears as a hyperlink on the search engine results page.

Talk about the topic in the very beginning

The search engine crawlers have millions of pages to crawl and they are constantly economizing the time they spend on individual pages. Talk about the main thing in the very beginning of your webpage so that even if they don’t go through the entire page they can make out the basic theme of the page and analyze it accordingly for the appropriate keywords.

Organize your text with headings, subheadings and bullets

Headings, subheadings and bullets often present the whole picture. Many visitors just go through the headings, subheadings and bulleted points and skip the finer print. You can use your headings to kindle their interest and encourage them to read the rest of the text also. Anyway, since headings, subheadings and bullets often contain the main highlights, if they are present on the page the search engine crawlers first go through them.

Basically, there is no set formula for writing SEO text because every keyword has its own peculiar way of performing, and you shouldn’t worry much about it. Just make sure the text is properly laid out, you use the keywords enough times, and you make the text reader-friendly. And don’t try to cram many keywords into one page, 2-3 keywords should be focused upon, and in fact, you should have separate dedicated pages for all your important keywords.

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