Author Archives: Amrit Hallan

About Amrit Hallan

Amrit Hallan is a professional content writer who helps businesses improve their conversion rate through credible and compelling content writing. His main strength lies in writing search engine optimized content without compromizing quality and meaningfulness.

Don’t obsess over SEO as long as you’re delivering meaningful content

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I was just reviewing a web hosting package for someone I know and came across an add-on package that tells you whether you are publishing SEO-friendly content or not.

Do these “SEO packages” really help? What about the SEO add-ons? I recently removed an SEO plug-in from my WordPress setup.

SEO is of two types:

Structural SEO
Content-based SEO

Although there are also on-site and off-site SEO tactics, but in the context of my current blog post, I’m just going to stick to the two above-mentioned SEO types.

What is structural SEO?

This makes sure that the basic structure of your website or web pages/blog posts is SEO-friendly.

To make sense of your web page or your blog post, the search engines like Google take into consideration the keywords within your title. This is debatable, but most of the SEO experts agree that a title containing your keywords is particularly important.

Your title is also important because it appears in search engine listings as a hyperlink.

Screenshot of title and description.

Multiple studies have revealed that if your title contains the words that have just been used in the search query, the greater number of people click your link.

The same goes with the description. Your keywords or parts of your keywords should appear in your description because then these keywords are highlighted by Google.

Hence, every web page for every blog post must have a clearly defined title and a description.

There is also a “keywords” meta tag but it is no longer relevant.

Another important aspect of structural SEO is, how easy it is for the search engine crawlers to access your main content.

If the crawler has to go through lots of source code (JavaScript, CSS, HTML, add-ons and plug-ins) before accessing your actual content, this negatively affects your search engine rankings. It is because sometimes the crawler leaves your website or a particular web page or blog post without even evaluating your main content because most of its time goes into crossing the jungle of your source code.

How fast your web page or blog post loads also has a direct impact on your overall search engine rankings. Make sure that your web pages and blog posts load fast, preferably within three seconds.

So, these are the components of structural SEO:

The title containing the main keyword or the search query.
Various combinations of the keyword or the search query in the description.
Easy access to the main content for the search engine crawlers.
Faster loading blog posts and web pages.

Most of the content management systems these days allow you to preset these structural SEO components. For example, in WordPress you can use Yoast SEO to make sure that whenever you publish a new web page or blog post, you separately enter the title and the description.

Structural SEO is not something that you need to do repeatedly.

What is content-based SEO?

It is mostly writing content that is most suitable to the query being used by your user.

Suppose a user looks for “Which is the best content writing service in India?”

To satisfy this query, you can either list 10-15 content writing services and then choose the best among them, or you can explain why your content writing service is the best in India.

In both the cases, you should remain true to the topic. You must talk about the best content writing service in India. When the user visits this link, he or she should get the answer he or she is looking for.

This doesn’t mean that the answer must be perfect. Maybe the search engine user doesn’t want to find information about your content writing service or why your content writing service is the best. He or she may be just looking for a comparative analysis of multiple content writing services.

Whatever you write, just make sure that you are providing an answer to the question being asked.

The next thing to keep in mind is, mention the main query or the keyword within the first 100 words. There is a logical reason.

The search engine crawler doesn’t always go through your entire text. It may simply go through the first few paragraphs, or even less. Hence it is important that the crawler comes across your main keyword or the main search query string as early as possible.

Other than this, there is no need to obsess about SEO. Focus on the quality, and to an extent the quantity of your content. Publish regularly. Right on relevant topics. It doesn’t matter whether you write 400 words or 4000 words.

What matters is the substance. Don’t necessarily extend the length of your web pages or blog posts simply because research has proven that most of the web pages and blog posts that get featured on the first search result page contain more than 1300 words. It differs from industry to industry.

Are you blogging regularly? Here is why you should

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Benefits of regular blogging.

In the beginning blogging started as a hobby movement. Publishing was being democratized on the Internet and many tools came to exist that would allow people to publish their thoughts and opinions without expensive software.

From Blogger.com to Movabletype to Tumblr, and everything in between, I have used practically every blogging platform, before finally settling with WordPress.

My website and my blog these days are powered by WordPress. Anyway, this is a side issue.

Once thousands of people started publishing their blogs regularly, they discovered that Google preferred blog posts over regular company web pages.

It wasn’t surprising. People shared more information through blog posts than through company web pages. The blogging content was more search engine friendly, especially when you used software like WordPress.

Most of the blog posts that you publish using WordPress are search engine optimized. These posts have SEO-friendly URLs. They have titles with the main keywords. People use headings and subheadings to create different sections. Many posts are interconnected through hyperlinks. Through the “Recent Posts” section, almost every post become scrollable.

Search engines like Google found blogs ideal for higher search engine rankings.

Soon the SEO community discovered blogs and started using blog posts to improve search engine rankings and to generate more traffic.

It worked wonders for many businesses. I definitely benefited from blogging. I still do.

Just as it happens with every technology and every trend, once a few people begin to benefit from it, more people want to benefit from it.

When more people benefit from it, they want to find faster ways to benefit from it. They begin to find workarounds. They begin to “exploit” loopholes and capabilities.

The same happens with blogging. These days almost every business website has a blog. Every entrepreneur knows that blogging is an essential part of search engine optimization. You have SEO plug-ins that tell you how to write (I recently uninstalled such plug-ins) to improve your search engine rankings. They tell you how many images are good and how many images are bad or whether you are repeating the keywords enough number of times or not.

Despite the fact that the search engine crawlers these days can crawl and index millions of pieces of content per second, the audience is still limited.

When you search for something, Google tells you that these many links have been found.

Content writing services – number of Google results.

Google is just trying to make you feel good that it has so much information for your queries. Of course, you’re not going to go through all these millions of links. At the most you’re going to check out the first and the second pages of search results.

Google may be crawling and indexing millions of links every day, the way people use this information hasn’t changed much. Most of the people still don’t go beyond the third page.

So, almost everyone is scrambling for the limited space.

This is where people begin to get disenchanted, and they lose confidence in the effectiveness of blogging. Not every blog post can appear on the first page. And that too, when you are competing with millions of blog posts for the same keyword or key phrase.

This is where they commit a mistake.

Don’t publish blog posts just to improve your search engine rankings

If you think that your blog exists only to improve your search engine rankings, you’re going to be in for disappointment.

The search engine benefits of blogging begin to show after some time. And that too if you blog regularly – 3-4 times every week.

Blogging definitely has SEO benefits and if you publish regularly, these benefits begin to manifest in a couple of months (provided you are publishing every day or every alternative day), but don’t just focus on improving your SEO.

The problem with just focusing on SEO is that then it becomes your primary concern. You want every post to rank well and for that, you take “measures” such as using keywords these many times, using the keywords in the title, and so on.

Yes, these things are important, and I strongly advise that you should use keywords in the title and in the copy even when you are not worrying much about your search engine rankings, but then there comes a time when instead of sharing your knowledge, you are constantly trying to improve your search engine rankings.

This becomes self-defeating. The more you try, the more you fail.

Is blogging no longer beneficial?

Blogging is still one of the best ways of improving your search engine rankings, engaging your audience and sharing your knowledge and experience.

Then why do so many people say that blogging is no longer beneficial?

They jumped on the blogging bandwagon just because they thought that blogging would improve their search engine rankings.

They had no intention of actually publishing engaging content to educate and inform and to add value. Their sole purpose was to exploit the platform to fill their websites and blogs with target keywords and key phrases.

The problem with this approach was, there were hundreds of thousands of people publishing blogs with the same attitude and the same approach.

How people search on Google and other search engines never changed. How many pages people were ready to check for the search results before giving up, never changed. The space was as limited as it was before.

The only thing that changed was, Google had more pages to crawl and index. The competition increased. The competitiveness of the keywords increased – it was harder to rank for the same keywords.

The more they tried to trick, the more “workarounds” they found, the smarter the Google ranking algorithm became at weeding out low-quality content.

Since these people mostly run behind razzmatazz, they began to find social media more attractive. They lost interest in blogging because well, running a successful blog is hard work. Rewarding, yet, hard work.

First they declared that email marketing is dead because they spammed the crap out of it – email marketing is still thriving and in fact, is more effective than it was 20 years ago.

Then they declare that blogging is no longer effective.

Blogging is still very much effective for those people who understand what blogs are for.

You need to understand that higher search engine rankings are a byproduct

Your higher search engine rankings are like money. How do you earn money?

Assuming you are not a swindler, or a robber, or a criminal in general (who work for the sole purpose of getting hold of money), you need to earn the money you have.

You are an engineer, and you are paid for your engineering skills. You are a web designer and you are paid for your web design skills. I am a writer, so, I’m paid for my content writing and copywriting skills. Famous performers become celebrities and they are paid for their ability to perform as well as for their celebrity status (which is, branding).

Hence, money doesn’t come to you for the heck of it. You do something else, and the money is a byproduct. Although, your ultimate goal is to earn as much money as possible, money can only come to you when you do something worth paying for. People, organizations, and businesses don’t just give you money because you exist. They give you money because you deliver something, or you satisfy some need.

The same happens with search engine rankings. Your rankings won’t improve because you desperately want to improve your rankings. Your rankings improve because you publish high quality content, content that people find useful. The more relevant your content is, the better search engine rankings you will enjoy. Hence, your search engine rankings are a currency.

This brings me back to the original question that I asked in the title of this blog post: Should you be blogging regularly?

This question was triggered by this Entrepreneur blog post that I came across yesterday: Why blogging should be on your weekly to-do list this year.

Blogging still delivers to those who understand the true essence of blogging – engaging audience by sharing valuable information.

The above Entrepreneur blog covers some important points about why you should be blogging regularly, but I will rewrite them here for my own audience.

Your blog gives reasons to people to visit your website multiple times

Familiarity builds trust. Whereas I definitely get new business queries from people who find my website on Google and have visited for the first time, people who actually end up becoming my clients (pay me for my services) have visited my blog or my website multiple times.

They have received my updates multiple times. They have read a few of my blog posts. They have come across my updates on LinkedIn.

Now, I’m not saying that I never get business from people who have just landed on my website – I definitely do – but most of my business comes from people who have visited my website multiple times.

This is true for almost every business. Nobody becomes your customer or client the first time he or she visits your website. People need some sort of familiarity. A blog that you regularly publish gives them a reason to access your content and consequently, become familiar to you, and then consequently, begin to trust you.

You get a chance to demonstrate your expertise through your blog

How do you convince people that you know your stuff? How do I convince people that I am a content writer who can provide engaging content to them and also help them improve their search engine rankings?

I regularly share my expertise on my blog. When people come to my blog, they know that I have covered practically every topic on content writing, content marketing and copywriting.

Hence, if you are looking for a content writer, do you feel confident working with a content writer about whom you don’t know much, or a content writer you are familiar with because he or she regularly shares his or her expertise through his or her blog?

Your blog gets you backlinks

As you regularly demonstrate your expertise in your field, people begin to respect you. They begin to look at you as an authority figure. After all, you need to have some knowledge to be able to write so much on your blog.

Also, very few people simply want to blow their own horn. They need validation.

Suppose I explain to you a particular method that can improve engagement on your website, I may also like to backup my claim by linking to another experienced content writer or digital marketing expert who says the same thing.

The more you blog, the more content you provide to other bloggers and publishers to link to. This improves your search engine rankings because backlinks are one of the most important requisites for higher search engine rankings. Especially the backlinks you earn through the strength of your content.

Regular blogging helps you build your mailing list

One of the biggest benefits of building a mailing list is that people trust you enough to share their email ID with you and give you access to their inboxes.

It shows they want to keep in touch. In case they are unable to visit your blog or website on their own, they don’t want to miss the great content that you are publishing. Subscribe to your mailing list only when you have something good to say regularly. They won’t be interested in you if you publish once or twice a month.

Regular blog publishing increases your search engine crawling rate

Google is constantly crawling the web to index new content and update existing content. But it needs to optimize its resources. If a website is updated once a month or once in two months, it’s no use sending out crawlers in its direction every day.

Hence, Google keeps track of websites that are published or updated frequently and then sets the crawl rate accordingly.

On one of my own blogs, I have observed that when I updated my blog multiple times in a day, my content was crawled and indexed within minutes. It was like, I published a blog post and then when I searched for it after a couple of minutes, it was there in the search results!

If you publish regularly then Google begins to crawl your website regularly. It means your content is crawled and indexed faster. Otherwise, it may take anywhere between one week or one month before your content begins to appear in search results.

In conclusion, blogging still holds the same benefits that it held a decade ago. It is still good for SEO. It is still good for engagement. It helps you promote yourself as an authority figure. It establishes you as an influencer. But only if you blog for the sake of blogging and not just for the sake of improving your rankings.

Why does regular content writing build trust?

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Familiarity through quality content builds trust.

Why do all the content marketers and digital marketers advise you to write and publish content regularly?

Of course, if the advice comes from content writers like me you can say that since I want people to publish more content (so that they hire me to write their content with greater frequency) it is in my interest that people publish more content.

Familiarity and trust on the Internet go together

How do you become familiar to your audience and your prospective customers and clients?

You cannot individually talk to thousands of people every day to become familiar to them.

You write and publish content they find useful. What is useful to them depends on your audience and this is something that you need to figure.

Some people are looking for funny and humorous content. Some are looking for controversial content. Some want political news. Some people want professional advice. Some people want to reduce their weight. Some people want to read good book reviews or gadget reviews.

The important thing is, your audience MUST want what you publish.

What do I achieve when I write and publish content on my blog? How do people become familiar to my business and how does it benefit me? I will explain.

I have three types of target audiences when I’m writing and publishing content regularly on my blog:

Readers who would subscribe to my newsletter.
Readers/publishers who link to my content, improving my search engine rankings in the process.
B2B readers who want to feel reassured that I am knowledgeable enough to write content for them.

I need to become familiar to these three categories. Eventually I want to maximize my business, but I cannot maximize my business without achieving No.’s 1 & 2.

Someday I would like my subscribers to pay for the knowledge that I share with them. It cannot happen right now, but I’m sure someday it well. That’s a business opportunity for me.

When my prospective subscribers regularly come across the useful content that I am publishing, they don’t want to miss it. To make sure that they don’t miss it, they subscribe to my updates. This builds my mailing list. I send them updates every day. My updates become familiar to them. They trust me enough to share their email ID with me.

Since I regularly publish content, the Google and other search engine crawlers crawl and index my content with greater frequency. It becomes easier to find my content on Google. When other publishers are searching for quality content to link to, they can find my links. Since I’m publishing lots of content, they want to link to my content. This further improves my search engine rankings, and hence visibility, and hence familiarity, and hence, trust.

Now we come to my prospective clients.

Why do my clients hire me? These are the reasons:

They are looking for quality content for their website and blog.
They are looking for a writer for their email marketing campaigns.
They know that high quality content can improve their search engine rankings and hence, they want to hire me.

My customers are B2B. Through my services, they want to increase their business. The stakes are higher. If I don’t give them good content, their business suffers.

Consequently, they need to trust their content writer. They need to know that their content writer is going to deliver. This is more important if writing is not their forte and they need to depend on the skill, talent and judgement of their content writer.

It’s easier to trust if you come across someone publishes content regularly. This content can appear in front of you in your inbox, on your social media timeline, or even search engine results.

Just imagine: there is a client who wants to improve her search engine rankings and she comes across a content writer whose many pages and blog posts rank well. On multiple occasions she has come across his or her links on Google. Isn’t this encouraging?

Regular content writing and publishing to build trust isn’t easy. It may be easy in the beginning when you are bubbling with ideas, but then you run out of ideas. How do you overcome that? You need a system. Will write more about that later.

How to write content that converts?

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The best way of developing conversion-friendly content is to clearly define what conversion means for that particular piece of content.

Conversion can be micro and macro. Macro conversion for almost every business is to generate more leads and customers/clients. This is the ultimate conversion goal.

What do we mean by micro-conversion?

Micro-conversion would be, people signing up for your newsletter, or downloading your white paper or case study, or simply sharing your content from their own social media profiles.

Micro-conversion is blog post specific, or web page specific, or a newsletter campaign specific, or even a social media update specific.

For example, after publishing this blog post, if I share the link on LinkedIn, why do I share it? I share it because I want maximum number of people to click the link and come to this blog post to read.

Once they are on this blog post, after reading it, it would be good if they signed up for my newsletter.

It would be better if they shared my link from their own social media accounts. It would be better if they linked to my blog post, or one of my blog posts, from their own website or from their own blog post. This improves my search engine rankings and enables my prospective clients to find my website on Google.

For most of the people, micro-conversion is improving search engine rankings for a particular keyword, especially the keyword or the key phrase they are using in the current blog post. Hence, their micro-conversion goal is met if they are able to rank the blog post higher for the keyword being used.

Another example of a micro-conversion would be to cover a topic in such a manner that it draws lots of traffic from Google and social media due to its quality and relevance.

Multiple micro-conversion successes lead to your macro conversion success – get you more leads, more customers or more clients.

Here are some things you can do to develop conversion-friendly content, or content that converts:

Always have a clear objective of what you intend to achieve.
Deal with a specific topic or a specific solution/answer.
Don’t cram too much information.
No need to always focus on selling and marketing.
Have a true intention when writing content.
Inform & educate instead of trying to impress.
Make it easier to read and share.
Write as if you’re talking to someone face to face.

I know, these are very clichéd pieces of advice, but you will be surprised to know how few content writers actually take care of this.

Content writing and searcher task accomplishment

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The more focused your content writing is, the better can be your search engine rankings. When you write on topics that are focused on providing a solution to a single problem, you cater to a concept called “searcher task accomplishment”.

The concept is simple. When you googled something last time, what was the exact reason. Were you looking for meaning of a word or an expression? Were you searching for your favorite celebrity? Did you want to check the latest Covid stats in your area?

How satisfied were you? Did you need to visit multiple websites (repeatedly coming back to Google and clicking the next link, or modifying the search) or were you able to find all you needed to find on a particular link?

You will say that I’m stuck in a loop (in case you have been reading my recent updates), but this is exactly why these days I’m focusing more on shorter blog posts that address a particular topic, and nothing else.

Writing shorter posts makes it easier for you to focus rather than scatter your topic among multiple topics that may be related but may also be overcomplicating what you’re trying to say.

This is not to say that longer blog posts cannot be focused. For example, if you write something like “How to use content writing to improve your SEO?” I can easily write 3000 words on the topic with every point covered in detail, without digressing from the main point.

But sometimes, just short answers are needed. For example, “How to write the perfect headline for your new blog post?” – It hardly takes 200 words to explain this concept.

It hasn’t yet been established that Google specifically uses the search task accomplishment factor in its rankings, but logically things are moving towards that.

Google is a product. It is a search engine. Hence, it intends to find the best possible information for your queries. The company’s entire existence depends on its ability to find you answers you’re looking for.

Through various behavioral patterns Google can find out whether people who find your link are satisfied with the discovery or not.

This is not very difficult. Suppose someone looks for “the best content writer for my IT consulting website” on Google.

Content writing services Google listing screenshot

He finds the link. Clicks it. Immediately comes back to Google and clicks the next link.

If the person doesn’t spend much time on the first link that he found, Google assumes that on that link he didn’t find the information he was looking for, for this particular search query. Google takes note of it.

If many people use this query, click the same link and then come back to Google to carry on with the search within a few seconds, Google assumes that the link does not have the right information and hence, begins to lower its rankings.

The reverse is also true. People use the above query, find a link, click it, and spend some time on the website. They explore other web pages. They read the complete web page or blog post.

Even when they come back to Google, the search engine knows that there was some relevant information on the link and that’s why people are spending more time on it. It assumes that they are finding the information they are looking for, for the search query they have just used.

Hence, tricking people into visiting your website can be counter-productive and it can actually harm your search engine rankings.

When you are writing content, concentrate more on the searcher task accomplishment factor. Provide the right information for the right query. This way, even if you are not writing longer blog posts, you will be providing answers to people’s questions and as a result, link by link, improving your search engine rankings.