SEO writing – three secrets revealed

Sure, you have to be creative when it comes to SEO writing. But there are also also handy tricks and tips that you need to keep in mind when writing for SEO. Here are three fundamental secrets to drastically improving your SEO writing. Secret 1: appeal Put your readership (which is your target demographic) first. Write how they want to hear things and solve their problems. Straight up give them the information they need, that they are searching Google for and that will generally make their lives easier.  The guru of SEO, Neil Patel, says ‘Your content needs to accomplish two goals: first, appeal to the end-user (customers, clients, prospects, readers, etc.) and second, solve a particular problem.’ For example, you’ve most likely come to this content article because you’ve searched how to write a SEO article. And I’m spelling it out as best I can and lay out all the right information you need to write an epic post.  What I often do when writing an article or web copy that I want optimised, is to write it as natural and best fitting to the audience as possible. It’s only after I’ve written the article to the best of my ability do I insert keywords. I don’t include them arbitrarily but where they can sit naturally without damaging the flow of the writing. But don’t misunderstand me because with most content writing, the keyword will inform the topic that I write about, so it’s important to do your keyword research from the absolute beginning.  Secret 2: top it You need to include your SEO keyword in your page title and your heading, once only. These are two separate facets of your content writing. The page title forms one of your meta tags and your heading (or headline) is your <h1> or <h2> tags.  It’s often suggested to put your keyword towards the front of your headline but you still need it to be super catchy and natural sounding. How to write great headlines.  Secret 3: body Next up, use your SEO keywords in your body text. In the olden days of SEO (AKA ten years ago), keyword stuffing was a surefire way to make you rank better. These days you will stuff yourself up if you do so. Google will recognise when you are doing so and penalise you as such. Plus, your readers will just be left shaking their heads. Credibility lost. I can’t give you a magic number of times to use your keyword in one SEO writing article because I want you to focus on making the content sound natural and flowing. But if you’ve only included the keyword once in one thousand words and one semantic keyword, you might need to hire a SEO copywriter. However, it’s purported that on page keyword usage is as important as 15.04 per cent of Google’s ranking algorithm. So that should give you an indication of the time and attention you should give just to your keywords alone.  It’s beneficial to include your keyword at the start of your article body. I aim for the first three words or the first sentence at best. Unless it sounds awkward and forced, then I forego it. Because great writing always comes first, right? ‘Quality has become the #1 ranking factor in Google, especially since the Google Panda and Penguin updates.’ Essentially, you need to write an entertaining and informative article. SEO writing is a little like juggling or doing a puzzle: each piece is as important as the other. And they all need to fit together until it makes a whole picture.  In summary, here are the most important factors— or secrets— of SEO writing, particularly if you are new to it: keywords: include in title, headline and body  writing well: provide great information balancing these two things together without hindering the other. As an experienced SEO writer, I can craft delightful content for your website or blog.

How SEO works

SEO is so important in today’s digital marketing. It’s one of my most effective strategies in gaining website traffic and I have seen many clients see success through employing even just the SEO basics.  57 per cent of business to business marketers say that SEO generates more leads than any of their other marketing initiatives. SEO is the practice of tweaking your website to get organic traffic through search engines. Mainly, the biggest search engine of them all: Google. The tweaking (also known as optimisation) are the changes that you make on the page with content and in the backend of your website platform. SEO also involves the process of driving traffic to your website (through social media and paid ads etc). SEO involves both onsite optimisation and offsite optimisation. The entire aim of SEO is to rank in the first couple of results (ideally somewhere on the first page) whenever someone Googles something that is relevant to your website. Or, specifically, one of your SEO keywords. Crawling and indexing Search engines are known to have two significant functions. Those being crawling and indexing websites and providing searchers with a ranked list of web pages they’ve determined to have the most helpful and relevant content they are searching for. To better understand this, picture the internet as a network of stops in a metropolis subway system. If every stop is a unique web page, we will have over a billion stops as the internet is a massive city. Since it is imperative for search engines to crawl through the entire city and discover all stops along the way, the quickest paths through the city are found using links. Links make it possible for search engines’ automated robots, also known as crawlers, to quickly search and catalogue a largenumber of interconnected documents on the internet. Once it locates these pages, the search engine creates a unique code for them and saves this information in large specialised databases, to be recalled and put to use only when needed in a search query. Providing answers Search engines are more like answer machines providing users with information relating to questions asked. When an individual performs a search online, the search engine immediately scours its gigantic database to pull up information relevant to the search query.  This brings us to a fundamental question: How do search engines like google determine the relevance and popularity of a web page? This explanation by SEO giant Red Evolution sums it up pretty well: ‘Google promotes authority pages to the top of its rankings, so it’s your job to create pages that become authority pages. This involves writing content people find useful because usefulcontent is shared in blogs, twitter feeds etc., and over time Google picks up on these authority signals. This virtuous circle creates strongand sustainable Google rankings.’ The above tells us that Google determines a website’s relevance by analysing its content, considering where certain words (known as keywords) are and how often they occur in that material. It also measures a website’s authority by the number of links pointing to it and how trustworthy those links are. It is the job of great SEO copywriting to build up your website’s relevance organically. In the past, this meant making sure your webpage had all the right keywords but these days this is a bit more difficult than it sounds. And it’s not enough to just have the right keywords. Google continuously updates their search algorithm to look for high qualitycontent that will be useful and not just one targeted to beat their system.  SEO can be a complex and detailed process. But you have to start somewhere. Browse through these informative SEO writing posts to learn the basics that anyone can put into place.