People from my website often ask me, “Are you an SEO writer?”
I always reply in the affirmative. I think I’ve always been an SEO writer because if you really understand who an SEO writer is, you know that every good writer — a writer who understands how to talk about a product or a service — is an SEO writer.
Don’t know what SEO means? It means search engine optimization. So, what exactly is SEO writing and how you can be an SEO writer?
When a searcher, for instance at Google, searches for a keyword or a key phrase, Google tries to rank the resulting links according to what they contain. Do they have information the searcher is looking for? What web pages have the most appropriate text? The job of an SEO writer is to convince the search engine robot — in the right manner — that OK, this is the web page that talks a lot about the term the searcher is searching for. The SEO should write the content of the page in such a manner that it should look very convincing to the search engine robot?
Whom does an SEO writer write for?
But does this suffice? No. The SEO writer doesn’t only have to satisfy the search engines. The SEO writer should also make sense to the readers, the human readers. The SEO content is written in such a manner that it should use the search terms enough times, but not more, and not less. Take for instance this article. The phrase SEO writer appears again and again, but unless your attention is specifically brought to it, you don’t realize that the phrase is being used again and again. This is the difference between an SEO spammer and an SEO writer. An SEO writer knows how to write and how to use the required key phrase again and again without resorting to needless keyword-stuffing, as you may have witnessed on many websites.
Should an SEO writer know how to tinker with HTML?
To an extent, yes. An SEO writer — apart from being a good writer — should also be aware of how the source of the web page appears to the search engines. Although it’s not necessary that an SEO writer should know how to create web pages, a fair knowledge of XHTML and the rudimentary tags can be of great help. It’s not enough that a page should have the rightly written optimized content (although for human reader this is enough). Quite often the search engine robots get lost in the quagmire of badly created web pages. For instances, all the header information should be there. The opening tags should be accompanied by closing tabs. There should be no dead links. Preferable, the links should contain the key phrases being searched for. A proper sitemap should exist in the root directory of the website.
A good SEO writer?
So what makes you a good SEO writer? Respect your readers first of all. Don’t mislead them, don’t write something you don’t mean to write. Write to the point, and unless you are experimenting with literary forms, be as succinct as possible.
On the other hand, being an SEO writer doesn’t mean you totally get trapped in the SEO stuff and start writing very rigid stuff. Always remember that even while being an SEO writer, your writing should touch the reader. It should leave an effect. You cannot succeed as an SEO writer if you can only bring in tonnes of traffic. That traffic has to generate business. You need to create music, and not noise.
