Tag Archives: Content Writing

Optimizing your content for search engines? Where do you draw the line?

The world was recently shocked at Robin Williams’ sudden death. As the news spread over the web everybody was searching for it. People wanted to know more about the actor, his depression, all his work and actually what led him to commit suicide, if at all he committed suicide. There was news of his daughter Zelda Williams quitting Twitter and Instagram because of the horrible treatment meted out to her by the notorious Internet trolls. Web-based newspapers and blogs were vying for the top search engine positions for terms like “Robin Williams dead at 63”. One of the news editors at New York Daily actually sent advisory to its writers and editors on which words and expressions to use in the headlines and when to scale up and scale down these words and expressions like “Robin Williams”, “dead”, “suicide”, etc. Here is how the internal email goes (the link above is the source):

From: Everett, Cristina

Date: August 12, 2014 at 5:33:00 PM EDT

To: WebEditors

Subject: ENTERTAINMENT handoff!

NOTES ON ROBIN WILLIAMS STORIES/HEDES!!

Thank you to everyone who did a great story [sic] with keeping our stories SEO strong with the * Robin Williams dead at 63 * header for the first 24 hours. Starting tomorrow morning, we can scale back on the robot talk (meaning no death header) just as long as the stories continue to *start* with his full name and include buzzy search words like *death, dead, suicide, etc.*

If you look at the comment thread in the above-linked short blog entry, you will get some interesting perspectives. Some people are cynical, and some say, well, what’s the choice? Aren’t people searching for these terms? If a renowned celebrity dies, and people are going to search about his or her death, the circumstances and other such bits of information and if you want to be found for such information, why not optimize your titles and content accordingly? What if your entire business model depends on such optimization?

Providing optimized content is my business. If one of my clients were running such an online news portal, would I indulge in such “tactics”? Yes I will. Of course I won’t advise my client to use SEO spam and create scores of meaningless pages talking on and on about the same thing (why Robin Williams committed suicide, for instance), but if a major news is breaking and if it matters that this news be found on the search engines, and considering the fact that many people are going to use “tactics” to make sure that their webpages and blog posts appear at the top, if expressions like “Robin Williams” and “suicide” are relevant to my story, I won’t shy away from using them. Yes, a death has occurred, yes, it is a terrible tragedy, but if covering that tragedy is my business, I need to SEO my content accordingly, too bad. Someone gives a nice example in the comments section that it’s like accusing a coffin seller of making a profit if lots of people suddenly die. What’s the attitude behind the above-mentioned advisory? Nobody knows, and that’s a different issue.

If content creators and publishers have to use SEO “tactics” like these, there is some problem in the way search engine rankings work and people who create truly high-quality content often worry about this. Content that truly deserves to get higher rankings never shows up on the first page just because the people who can follow the “tactics” have an edge even while creating lousy content.

When creating content for your business, have a passion for helping people

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Nothing exudes passion like the passion for helping people and this can help you a lot when you are creating content for your business. Otherwise, why would people access your content? Why would they react? They are not going to access and promote your content as a goodwill gesture, will they? You need to give something to them, something useful, something helpful, something that helps them solve their nagging problem.

People come to your website looking for a solution. You probably have that solution, or you don’t have it. If you don’t have that solution, well, then there is nothing to talk about (unless you want to direct them to another source that has what they’re looking for). If you have that solution how do you convince people that your solution is better compared to the other sneaky guy who is always trying to outsell you? Rather than offering your product or service, you help them by offering a solution. Convince them that you are here to solve their problem. Empathize with them. Understand that they are going through a difficulty, you can relate to that difficulty, you yourself have gone through a similar difficulty and maybe that’s why you started this business in the first place, and now you would like to solve their difficulty.

You cannot pretend to be passionate unless you are a world-class writer on your way to getting the Booker prize. The passion has to come from within. You should actually feel like helping people. Help people and the commercial side of your business gets taken care of on its own. After all, people would like to do business with a person who is passionate about helping them.

So when you create your content, don’t just create content to improve your search engine rankings or just in order to convince people. Create and write content to help people. Solve their problems and they will eagerly do business with you.

Why you should create evergreen content and how to create it

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Evergreen content is just like an evergreen movie or an evergreen song – something that you can experience and enjoy irrespective of when you watch it or listen to it. Evergreen content never goes stale. It’s like the immortal wisdom of great philosophers; it is timeless, it is fundamental, it can be applied in any age. No one says about evergreen content that it is out of date or irrelevant.

Why should you create evergreen content when it is always recommended you create topical and contemporary content? Both have its value but the benefit of creating evergreen content is that it is always useful. A blog post that you write in 2014 will provide the same value to a person who reads it in 2018. Maybe the examples that you use won’t be relevant, but the inherent message will still be.

A good example of evergreen content would be, writing a blog post on the importance of headlines. Catchy and compelling headlines will never go out of fashion. They were used to grab attention back in the 1700s and they’re still being used to grab attention these days. Their fundamentals never change.

Similarly, writing something about nutrition can be evergreen (they are just examples, you may have your own example coming from your own industry, realm or subject). Can eating nutritious food be ever irrelevant (unless there is no need to have food and we can simply swallow a capsule or tablet or even use a one-time shot to do away with the need for food, forever)?

Why publish evergreen content on your website or blog?

To keep your content relevant for a very long time
To make your content appropriate for long-term content curation
To encourage people to link to your content without worrying about it becoming irrelevant after a while
To enable your content to generate revenue for a long time rather than for a short time
To encourage people to share your content with each other without worrying about irrelevancy and outdatedness
To focus on quality rather than quantity and timeliness – when you prepare evergreen content you are in a more relaxed frame of mind and you are able to focus on the quality rather than worrying about missing the deadline
To create a portal of knowledge – with more and more evergreen content on your website or blog comes to be known as a portal of knowledge for your particular niche
To improve your long-term SEO – evergreen content not just enjoys good search engine rankings, but lasting rankings. This is because as people share your evergreen content more and more the relevancy of your content for the search engines keeps on increasing

How to create and publish evergreen content?

Mind your niche: First of all your content needs to be niche-specific. There is no sense creating evergreen content for a dating website that talks about how to survive in the Sahara (unless of course there is a connection). So make a list of topics that you think will draw people to your website in relation to your business rather than as a random occurrence simply because at that particular time they happen to be looking for how to survive in the Sahara.
Pack as much information as possible: Long form content fares better in search engines compared to shorter articles and blog posts. People tend to curate comprehensive, detailed content because it contains the information they need, in detail. Don’t be so detailed that one piece of content goes on and on. Use your own judgment. Try to think from the perspective of your reader. Don’t assume he or she knows what you know.
Lists are better compared to unformatted paragraphs: Take for instance “15 things that make your content go viral”; it is better than “How your content goes viral” or “How to make your content go viral”, followed by long streams of text. People want to know exactly how much they are going to learn.
Write about occasions and seasons: You may feel that writing about Christmas, Diwali, Ramadan or the Valentine’s Day are once-in-a-year of occurrences and hence might not be evergreen. But they definitely attract yearly traffic if you have written something like, “20 ways to avoid post-Christmas depression” because people need such articles every season. Similarly you can write “50 items to stock in order to survive a long power cut during winter”. Or something like “5 things you should immediately do during an earthquake”.
Create a “Regularly Updated” section: This is a section that, as the title suggests, you update regularly and since you update it regularly it is constantly having fresh content and hence you can call it evergreen. In order to seek fresh, useful content, people are going to visit that section on an ongoing basis. Your business blog can be one example.
Create an FAQs section: When people use your product or service they constantly need to know about it. Sometimes they have technical questions, sometimes they have existential dilemmas, whatever, whenever they have a doubt, they head to your FAQs section.
Create an online forum: Having an online forum is a great way of creating evergreen content because people are constantly posting questions and answers. If you notice, even posts and answers created in 2004 may appear in search results sometimes.

This is no way a comprehensive list because every business need is unique but this list gives you a basic idea of how to create evergreen content for your business that generates ongoing traffic for a long time.

I sometimes prefer that my client has already worked with another content writer

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“Dear Amrit, the content writer that I hired before contacting you totally botched up the project and I haven’t just ended up with lousy content my website launch has also been delayed by a full month because my web designer was waiting for the content writer to complete his job. I so wish I had found your website before hiring this content writer. By merely going through a few pages of your website I’m damn sure you are the content writer I need, and should have sought.”

It may seem like a self-boast, but I actually got this message recently from a new client and this is not a new phenomena. I mean, not all emails are so praising, but the message is more or less the same, that they have had a very bad experience with the previous content writer, they’re looking for a new content writer and they hope I can undo the damage to some extent.

I prefer such clients. I don’t mean to say that I cherish the fact that they have been shortchanged, that they have lost time, that someone did a lousy job, no, what I like is, by the time they come to me, they’re pretty sure what they want and what they don’t want and since they have already had a bad experience with their choice, they are more open to my suggestions. It makes easier for me to work on their projects. This doesn’t happen with great regularity, but I get at least 5-6 projects like these in a year.

Often the problem is not with outsourcing

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I was just going through a rant in an email newsletter about why businesses, especially small businesses, shouldn’t outsource and why it makes sense hiring people in-house.

On the surface there is nothing wrong in the argument because how you get your work done depends on your personal choice whether you want to hire someone full-time, part-time or outsource.

The problem is, when people have bad experience outsourcing their work, they start talking about how outsourcing sucks and why people shouldn’t indulge in it. They rarely try to observe the situation from the opposite angle, that is the person who is outsourcing the work rather than the one to whom the work is being outsourced.

There are innumerable, hard-working, sincere and efficient people on the Internet. Here I’m not going to talk about myself, but almost 3 years ago my client Steve decided to hire a programmer from the Philippines using an outsourcing company and we have had a great experience. He does such a great job that recently when Steve was contemplating terminating the contract (because he felt the job for which the programmer was hired is almost done) I convinced him into not letting the programmer go just because it is so difficult to get such people. You may say I’m contradicting myself (that it is very difficult to get good people to whom you can outsource your work and hence, they are an exception rather than a norm) but I will just come to another point.

The problem is people are either too lazy to look for good talent, or they are simply cheap. I have been writing content for the past 12 years and 70% of the queries seek “world-class content” at “cheap rates”. They actually expect me to create 1000-word “high-quality” blog posts for as little as $5. By offering $5, how much time do you expect me to spend on your blog post?

More than that, how much value do you attach to building your own business assets?

As a content writer living in a Third World country, I (I as any other person) may have my own compulsions for accepting such low-paying assignments and eventually screwing up everything because it is not humanly possible to create enough content to make a decent living with such a rate, what is your excuse? If you cannot afford to spend $35-50 on a decent blog post, why in the first place you are in this business? Either create your own content or hire someone who charges decently, and does good work. If you think that your blog post is worth just $5, if you think that your content writer can be so cheap, then feel fine about getting a cheap deal. Don’t crib.