Category Archives: Content Writing

Etiquette dos and don’ts when writing content

Etiquette do’s and don’ts when writing content.

I was just browsing my content aggregator and I came across this blog post on the etiquette dos and don’ts of content writing thinking that the post actually talks about etiquettes.

Well, instead of talking about etiquettes it gives you the general dos and don’ts of writing effective content.

Nonetheless, the author has shared some good tips on what to take care of when writing content and what you should avoid.

I am quickly going to present a run down on what to do and what not to do.

Focus more on delivering value when writing content

This must be your primary focus.

Most of the people publish content because they want to improve their search engine rankings (or simply fill up their website because without written content, the website would look odd), but the primary purpose of writing content is to deliver value and engage your visitors.

If you deliver value and engage your visitors, your search engine rankings automatically improve.

Have a doubt? Read this blog post: Relationship between quality content writing, bounce rate and SEO.

Make sure you proofread and edit

Once you have written your content, make sure you go through it. Read it aloud if it’s possible.

What do I do when I’m editing?

I mostly shorten my sentences. I shorten my paragraphs. I remove needless adverbs and adjectives. Sometimes I add needless adverbs and adjectives.

Just make sure your content is easy to read and it does not have embarrassing mistakes.

Write for your niche

Defining your niche makes it easier for you to focus your writing.

When you are writing content, you are having a conversation with the reader.

Just imagine talking to someone who doesn’t want to talk to you.

Of course, defining your niche is not as easy as it may seem, but you should narrow it down as much as possible.

When I’m writing content for my blog, I am mostly targeting people who are looking for an experienced content writer who can help them publish engaging content and at the same time, can also help them improve their search engine rankings.

In the conventional sense my niche is quite broad – I get content writing queries from real estate businesses to blockchain businesses to IT consultants to babysitting businesses to online retail stores, and pretty much everything in between.

One thing is common though: they are all looking for a content writer.

They may need a content writer for their website, or their blog, or their email marketing campaigns or their social media campaigns.

Hence, I have lots of content targeting these categories.

Keep SEO in mind while writing

Though, you shouldn’t obsess about SEO when writing content, this is an aspect that you cannot ignore.

How do you write SEO content?

You may want to read How do I write search engine friendly content for my clients?

There are some other tips that I just wrote about in the link I have shared just above.

These are some basic do’s and don’ts. They’ve got nothing to do with etiquettes.

Anyway, what etiquettes should you keep in mind when writing content?

Here are a few things to consider:

Try to write gender neutral content if it is not being written for a specific gender.
Don’t offend people on the basis of race, region, religion or class.
Don’t use abusive language.
Respect your audience and don’t dumbify them.
Don’t mislead your audience just to improve your SEO.
Don’t keep promises you cannot keep.
Don’t be judgmental or condescending.
Avoid taking a political stand when you are writing for business.

Since the title of this blog post hints as of the blog post contains some insights on etiquettes, I wanted to write something about this issue. Maybe later on I will do a complete blog post on this.

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.

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.

Backlinks is one of the biggest benefits of educational or informational content

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One of the biggest benefits of informational content is link building.

Sometimes you may wonder what is the use of publishing lots of educational or informational content? This is the content through which you share your knowledge, experience, and wisdom with your visitors.

For example, what is the benefit of writing a blog post like What is search intent and how knowing it improves your SEO?

You must think that clients are looking for a content writer or a copywriter. They don’t want to be educated; they just want a talented writer for their websites.

One of the widely recognized benefits of sharing your knowledge through writing is that it establishes you as an authority figure.

I can write extensively about content writing only if I know a lot about content writing.

If I don’t know how to write engaging content, how am I going to write engaging content for my clients, and how do my clients know that I actually know how to write engaging content?

Sure, I can share my portfolio with them. I can send the links of various websites for which I have written engaging content.

Why publish lots of educational content or content for informational search intent?

Educational and informational content gets you more backlinks

You need backlinks to improve your search engine rankings. People are ready to pay for quality backlinks.

When you have lots of quality educational content on your website or blog, people link to it voluntarily.

I have so many blog posts people have linked to.

How do they find my blog posts?

Mostly when they are searching for relevant content on Google or some other search engine.

I also share links to my existing and latest blog posts on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Once they start linking to your content, it becomes self-perpetuating. It is like, your links are appearing on the third or fourth page of Google. People find your content and link to it. Your links move to the second or third page. It becomes easier to find your content. More people link to it. Then your links move to the first or the second page. And so on.

Due to better rankings of the present links, even the rankings of the links that were previously not ranking higher, begin to appear higher.

Hence, more people start linking to them, and the cycle continues.

It is not an exact science. You never know at which juncture people begin to find your content with greater regularity. But eventually, if you keep on publishing quality, link-worthy content, it happens.

Educational content is easier to rank on Google than commercial content. Google gives informational content preference over commercial or transactional content because maybe it wants people to promote commercial or transactional content through advertisements.

People publishing educational content are looking for educational content. And if you are publishing informational or educational content that is link-worthy, people start linking to it.

This improves your search engine rankings for your relevant keywords. This makes it easier for your prospective customers and clients to find you.

How much educational or informational content should you publish for backlinks?

There is no limit.

I will give you an example of my own website.

Mine is not an e-commerce website. People don’t come and buy stuff here. It’s mostly information. I share information with them, and they hire me as their content writer or copywriter.

On my website, my content falls primarily under two categories:

Transactional content
Informational content

Transactional content is the main website content that I have that talks about my website content writing services, my blogging services, my email writing services, my content consulting services, and so on.

These must be around 50-60 pages. Even among these pages, not every page is transactional content. Even on my main website, I have published lots of pages that simply explain to my visitors what different services mean. I inform them and then leave it up to them whether they want to contact me or not.

Among all the content on my website, 90% of the content exists on my blog. There are over 800 posts and counting. This is all educational and informational content. It is this content that is responsible for my rankings. Whatever visibility I have on the web, it is because of this educational content.

My educational content has improved the rankings of my transactional content.

Is link building the only benefit of educational content?

One of the major benefits, yes.

It’s not that your informational or educational content doesn’t get your clients. Mine does.

Even when I didn’t enjoy better search engine rankings, I got content writing assignments on the strength of my content.

For example, once I published a blog post titled What are topic clusters and pillar pages and how they improve your SEO… within a couple of days a client wrote to me that he loved what I had written on the blog and he was looking for a similar blog post for his company website. I’m still writing for him.

There are multiple examples like this one.

This is why I’m publishing more smaller posts these days on my blog

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What is the benefit of writing smaller posts?

Since I have just started publishing comparatively smaller posts on my blog, many thoughts are coming to me.

One of the biggest benefits of writing smaller posts is that you are not bogged down by what the supposed length should be.

Another benefit of smaller posts is that you don’t necessarily have to write it for your own blog. Although I’m not crazy about sharing my content on third-party platforms more than necessary, shorter posts can be reused on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook.

You don’t need to follow a format. You can use bulleted points. You can use single sentences. Sometimes, you can just use a few words.

You can also bulk create your posts. It hardly takes 5-10 minutes to write 100 words or 200 words. Write them somewhere and then publish them as and when you want.

Or, you can use a scheduler like Buffer app to automatically publish your post at the designated time.