How is SEO content writing different from regular content writing? Does it matter that you pay attention to how you are arranging content on your web pages and blog posts in order to improve your search engine rankings? Right now it does, in the future, things may improve and perhaps the search engines will be able to rank URLs according to their actual value rather than the words being used.

The fundamental challenge of content writing, especially on the Internet, is, striking a balance between meaningfulness of the content and SEO. Frankly, there is no escape from paying attention to the way search engines interpret your content if search engine traffic matters to you. Whatever you are writing, eventually, it’s the algorithms that decide for which keywords and key phrases – whether you’re trying to target shorter phrases or longtail keywords – your content is ranked, or not ranked.

These days I am using ScribeSEO to revamp all the content on my website as well as blog. Although I am an experienced content writer, and I know a thing or two about writing content for SEO, sometimes it becomes difficult to keep track of the language you are using while writing content. It doesn’t happen all the time, but once you start analyzing your content using specialized tools, interesting things get revealed.

For instance, one of my pages, despite different tries, was optimized for “your content” despite the fact that I was targeting for “content writer”. Who would, and how many, would search for something like “your content”? The language that I had used, seems to have misled the ScribeSEO analysis software.

No, I’m not saying that you should get too much bogged down by what a particular SEO tool advises (or for that matter, an SEO expert) you to do in order to improve your search engine rankings. Nothing can surpass your own judgment and analysis. Of course when you need to do lots of content writing one or another tool comes handy, but eventually it is your own way of writing that can help you in terms of SEO.

Are SEO and content writing interrelated

It depends. Pure SEO doesn’t mean good conversion rate and effective content writing doesn’t always mean higher search engine rankings. That is why I said in the beginning, an experienced content writer tries to strike the perfect balance. When I’m working for my clients, I know that search engine traffic for them is as important as, if not more, their conversion rate. If there is no traffic, or very little traffic, there aren’t many people to do business with. Conversely, if the content doesn’t convert, no matter how much traffic you get from search engines, it hardly matters.

How do you make sure your content writing caters both to the search engines and the human visitors?

It’s very easy to do once you decide to write what really matters rather than being manipulative. SEO content writing actually depends on writing content that is totally user-friendly. There are primarily 5 things you need to take care of

• What language does the target audience use vis-à-vis the product or service you are writing about
• How focused you are going to remain on the topic of that particular page or blog post
• What are the key words or phrases people use on search engines while trying to find what you are going to write about
• Use those keywords and key phrases judicially while creating content
• Use those keywords and key phrases at prominent locations such as the first paragraph, the title tag, the description, headings and subheadings and bulleted points

The language is important because this is the same language people use while talking about your product or service, whether they’re trying to search for it on Google or talking about it over there social networking profiles. The problem with SEO content writing is that it has a sort of, bad reputation. People relate it to keyword stuffing. It actually means writing content that search engines think the users will appreciate and like.

It doesn’t always have to involve your core topics. There may be some interesting news, or even political news that directly or indirectly affects your business or the way your prospective customers and clients do business with you. SEO content writing can involve sharing your thoughts with your readers and somehow relating them to your own business.

Remember that these days search engines, especially Google, are very touchy about the overuse of keywords. So don’t use them if there is no need to use them. That is why you need to vertically focus on the topic of the page you are writing the content for, so that you can naturally use those keywords and key phrases.

So should SEO be in your mind while writing content? It should be, even if getting good rankings isn’t one of your priorities. Good SEO practices while writing content automatically make your content more focused, subject-specific and easier to read. Search engines want to index and rank content that they think is useful to their users. By following good SEO practices while writing content, you make it more user-friendly.