Tag Archives: Content Writing

Does the language you use on your website or blog affect your search engine rankings?

By language here I don’t mean English or Portuguese or French; by language I mean the words and phrases that you use in order to create content for your website or blog.

Creating search engine optimized content is all about conveying the right message for the appropriate search terms. Whenever you are writing for your website you have to keep in mind – if it is important – for what search expressions your website should draw traffic from various search engines. For instance, my website is about offering content writing and online copywriting services. So any mixture of these expressions must get me higher rankings if I want to keep doing business through search engines.

There are many webmasters and Internet marketing experts that suggest that one shouldn’t solely depend on search engine traffic and this is true. Nonetheless the majority of your traffic comes from search engines if you don’t have thousands of incoming links from other web sites and blogs and you haven’t got tons of money to invest in online advertising. Traffic from search engines can be an invaluable, low-cost opportunity that you must leverage, and this can be done by using language that conveys the most appropriate message to the search engine algorithms so that they can rank your website or individual web pages accordingly.

Language definitely affects your search engine rankings at least in the current context. People talk about semantic optimization, and even natural language processing, but right now it doesn’t seem to be happening. The actual words still matter. If I am promoting content writing I’m not getting search engine traffic if people are searching for a creative writer, even if I wish I did and suggested subtly somewhere on my website – I get found if people are looking for a content writer because I talk so much about content writing.

This I learnt the hard way. Before deciding to become a content writer I used to design and develop websites. Due to some vague reason I ended up optimizing my website for the term “Web designing” rather than “Web designer”. I featured on the first page of Google for Web designing for a good two years and I didn’t generate much business (blogging hadn’t arrived at that time otherwise I would have converted the website into a blog). I should have actually optimized my website for web designer (of course the good side is I became a content writer). These are the small things that can have long-lasting repercussions if you’re not careful about the language you use on your website.

Image source: brandis78

What type of content actually moves your visitors?

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You publish content on your website or blog with a purpose. In fact whenever you publish something on your website or blog (from now onwards I’ll only say website and you can assume it for your blog too), you want it to do something. You don’t publish content without purpose. This is why in order to come up with effective and compelling content you must be clear about its purpose. Ask yourself the following questions:

Do you want people to purchase something from your website, or subscribe to your service or RSS feeds, or hire you, after reading your content?
Do you want them to click the advertisements that you have published on your website?
Do you want them to engage in conversation in order to build your brand?
Do you want them to promote your content on their own websites and blogs and on various social media and social networking websites?
Do you want to increase your search engine traffic?
Do you want to improve your conversion rate?

There can be many more questions but these are the fundamental questions you should ask yourself while creating your content strategy. Once you know what you want to actually achieve by publishing content on your website you can generate better content.

We all want to publish content that moves our visitors into taking some desired action. Your visitors will be moved if your content gives them what they seek. So after figuring out what you want your content to achieve for you, you have to figure out what it achieves for your visitors. Does it provide something that they desperately need?

When a visitor comes to your website he or she is normally:

Trying to purchase something in order to satisfy a need or an urge
Looking for a solution to a nagging problem
Looking for information that he or she may not find easily somewhere else
Searching for entertainment or amusement
Seeking advice or encouragement, or love
Looking for an outlet
Looking for a service provider

Again they can be hundreds of more reasons for people to come to your website, you had to figure that out.

So in order to come up with content that moves your visitors:

You must know why people should come to your website
How your content is going to convey that you really have what they seek, and do it convincingly

Branding with a customized content

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The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines a brand as a “name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of other sellers.”

Over the Internet branding acquires a unique importance because often your presence, product and services are existing in a virtual world – people, your prospective customers, can view the images of your products or services, or even attain some digital samples if possible, but they cannot do more than that. They cannot touch or feel your offerings. If they want to purchase a pair of trousers from you, they cannot try it before buying it.

So to inspire confidence among your consumers branding becomes more important. Branding convinces them that yes, whatever they buy from you is going to be up to the mark, and buying from you doesn’t involve more risk than, say, buying from a brick-and-mortar store.

How do you establish such a brand presence on the Internet? Testimonials, recommendations and affirmations from existing customers and clients surely help. But what also helps is the way you communicate, the content on your website, your blog, and your social profile.

We operate in a conversation economy these days: what you say, and how you say it, can have immediate repercussions. Your latest blog post or article can reach the farthest corners of the planet within a few seconds with a couple of tweets or a few hundred diggs. Your content can go a long way to help you establish your brand on the Internet.

Useful, relevant and well-meaning content helps you generate a community around your presence. There are many entrepreneurs who did nothing but nurture a community around their blogs or websites. They spent more than a year generating awesome content and establishing their loyalty, and consequently, their brands. Eventually there came a time when their visitors themselves started saying that they would buy or subscribe to anything recommended or promoted by those blog or website publishers. So when these content publishers started selling on their blogs and websites, they had a ready-made market that was eagerly waiting to do business with them.

Customized content means generating content your audience can relate to. A person who publishes a blog on SEO and whose advise benefits his or her audience has a greater chance of succeeding when he or she decides to provide professional SEO services. Many among his or her current readers will eagerly become his or her clients because they are aware of the fact that he or she can really help improve their search engine rankings. Similarly, a person who writes authoritative material on management consulting has a greater chance of converting his or her visitors into his or her clients.

You can apply this branded content technique to any business.