Tag Archives: seo content writing

How to evaluate your SEO content writing

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how-to-evaluate-your-SEO-content-writingSEO these days depends a lot on your content writing. Of course, it has always depended because unless you have content, there can be no SEO, but these days you especially need to continuously evaluate your SEO content writing because badly written content can harm your SEO as much as well-written content can improve it. Read 10 tips on how to write SEO content for your website.

Search Engine Journal has published a nice post on How to evaluate the SEO value of a piece of content and I thought, I would add my own thoughts to it. This post on the importance of evaluating your SEO content writing mentions two ways Google determines the SEO value of your content:

  1. Behavioral analysis: Google analyses how people behave while accessing and consuming your content. How much time they spend on individual blog posts and webpages? How often your content is shared among people and social networking websites?
  2. Quality Raters: Everything isn’t algorithmic at Google it seems. Google also hires human search quality raters who use predetermined guidelines to check whether you actually have quality content or somehow you have gamed the system. Read 30+ important takeaways from Google’s search quality raters guidelines (a Moz blog post).

Why is it important to evaluate your SEO content writing continuously?

As mentioned above, Google uses user behavior as well as human quality raters to ensure the quality of its search results. Let’s delve into the behavioral analysis part deeper for a while. What sort of behavior tells Google that you have got quality content, content worthy of being ranked higher?

  • Your content delivers value
  • Your content is useful
  • People like reading your content or watching it
  • People link to your content because it is so valuable
  • People share your content on social networking websites because they think it will be useful to their friends and family

These are human validations. It makes it easier for Google algorithms to evaluate your content because the job of evaluation is being done by humans themselves. By staying longer on your website, by sharing your content, by linking to it, they are telling Google that the content is valuable and of high quality.

So, in order to evaluate the SEO of your content writing, you continuously have to evaluate its relevance, its quality and its value. It’s not just about sticking to Google’s guidelines, it’s about delivering value through content writing. If you deliver value, you automatically stick to Google’s SEO guidelines, unless you do something really stupid, like 60% of your content being your keywords.

What do you need to consider while evaluating your SEO content writing?

Here are a few things you can keep in mind while evaluating the SEO of your content writing:

  • Research your keywords and search terms that people use to find your website. Do a comprehensive research. Don’t assume what keywords and search terms people would use just because you like those keywords and search terms. Think from their perspective. Prepare a physical list using an Excel sheet.
  • Write high quality content that helps people solve problems. Remember that ultimately your content needs to be useful to people and if it is not useful, no matter how much “optimization” you do, it is not going to work. As you have seen above, human validation is very important for Google and even other search engines like Bing. You cannot make people like your content just by the dint of its existence. You actually have to deliver value.
  • Use the right keywords and search terms while writing your content. Search engine optimization is very important because more than 70-80% people, despite social networking websites, still use search engines to find your content. If they cannot find your content, it is of no use to them. They’re not going to read your content and they are not going to share it and they are not going to link to it if they cannot find it. So, use your keywords, and use them contextually. Don’t stuff them.
  • Go an extra mile to make sure that right people can find your content. Share your link on your social networking profiles. Use different formats like images, videos and slides to make your content available in as many formats and as many media channels as possible. This is where marketing comes. After content writing comes content marketing. Read Content writing is just a tiny part of content marketing, but the most important.
  • Google also evaluates the SEO of your content writing by the length of it. If your blog post or webpage is less 300 words, Google calls it “thin content”: although it is content, it is not of much value. The length matters these days. Write blog posts and articles that are more than 1000 words, whenever possible.
  • Never forget accessibility. Does your website comply with the W3C guidelines? When you make your content accessible it’s SEO value automatically increases. This is because when your content is accessible to humans, it is also accessible to search engine crawlers. Use the right attributes to organize your content. Use headline tags and bullet tags to make your content scannable. Use alt text, title text and captions to make your images accessible. Don’t use lots of JavaScript before your content.

Finally, this is how you evaluate your SEO content writing

  • Is your SEO content attracting traffic for the right keywords?
  • Is your content attracting enough traffic?
  • Are people linking to your content? This is one of the most important ways of evaluating the SEO of your content writing because people will link only when your content is worthy of linking.
  • Is your bounce rate coming down? Are people spending more time on your website or blog consuming your content? If they stay longer on your website it means they find your website useful and consequently, it tells Google that your content is useful.
  • Are people sharing your content on social networking websites? This is a very nice benchmark to evaluate the SEO of your content writing. Many people sharing your content on social networking websites means your content is valuable, interesting and worth-sharing.
  • Are you linking to other pages and blog posts from within your website when writing new content? This makes it easier for Google crawlers to find your content.

These are a few ways of evaluating the SEO value of your content.

What is the importance of content writing in SEO?

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importance-of-content-marketing-in-SEOThe importance of content writing in SEO can never be overstated. With most of the SEO services making content writing an integral part of search engine optimization, you cannot separate content writing from SEO. Read Why you can’t ignore content marketing as an SEO expert.

Why is content writing important for SEO?

One of the biggest reasons why the importance of content writing in SEO never diminishes is that Google prefers high-quality content. Long gone are the days when your content (your links) could get good rankings on the strength of just your keywords and key phrases.

Of course, keywords and key phrases still matter and you cannot hope to get better SEO without creating content around your keywords, but they are not the sole drivers of your rankings. Read 10 tips on how to write SEO content for your website.

Your rankings don’t just depend on keywords. Your SEO depends on:

  • The value of your content
  • The quality of your content writing
  • The keywords and the key phrases that you use
  • The social media attention your content gets
  • The number of backlinks your website or blog gets from “trusted” websites
  • The frequency with which you publish content on your website or blog

Social validation and backlinks these days are as important as the quality of your content, the number of webpages and blog posts, and your keywords. In many cases, even if your content is mediocre, just because it is being linked from different external websites, it enjoys better rankings, so much is the importance of backlinks. Read Relation between content writing and SEO.

You will notice that all the points mentioned above involve content writing unless the primary content that you publish is videos and images.

Unless you write quality content you are not going to get social media attention. People are not going to share your content. People are not going to link to your content. You have to provide value. Your content needs to be well written and relevant. It should be inspiring enough to make people talk about it and link to it. They’re not going to link to your content as a social service. They won’t pay attention unless there is an overwhelming reason to pay attention.

This is where importance of content writing in SEO stems from.

Why does Google give importance to content writing for SEO?

The reason is very simple. What does Google do? It finds useful information for people. If it is not able to find useful information based on the search terms people use, people will stop using it. This is why a large team of math PhD’s at Google are working round-the-clock churning up algorithms to weed out inferior content and push forward high-quality content. Read How to write content for humans but optimize for Google and other search engines.

So, Google’s present and future depends on quality content writing, credible content writing. Without relevant content, Google cannot survive. Hence, it loves you if your content writing is good, and it ignores you, and even penalizes you, if your content writing is inferior. This is why content writing is so important for your SEO.

Brief recap of how to do content writing for SEO

Content writing for SEO isn’t as difficult as it may seem. All you have to do is write for niche topics and stay focused. Aside from this, here are a few content writing tips for better SEO

  • Do detailed keyword research before content writing: Keyword research is very important. Although over-use of keywords in your content writing can get you penalized and your rankings may suffer, writing content around your keywords, as of now, is unavoidable. Focus on long phrases. Write your content as if you are providing answers to questions. This will help you write your content around your keywords or the search terms people use to find your website or blog.
  • Write about something people care about: Create content people would like to find. Write on topics that matter to people because after all people will be searching for those topics. I provide content writing and content marketing services on my blog so it doesn’t make sense that I start publishing tutorials on how to tweak your TV settings, unless the topic is related to content writing and content marketing.
  • Take care of the length: Longer blog posts and articles seem to rank well these days, or at least people are claiming that they do. It must be Google’s another attempt to keep lazy people away. In order to write long blog posts and articles you need to work hard, you need to come up with relevant information to enable you to write longer pieces. Anyway, when you’re writing blog posts and webpages, try to write at least 600 words. In this video Matt Cutts recommends at least 400 words for better SEO but I think this is old story. If you can manage, regularly cross 1000 words and better, try to reach 2000 words. Read The difference between long form and short form content.
  • Analyze your web analytics data routinely: You should monitor your content using Google Analytics and Google’s Webmaster Tools. These will tell you if your content is attracting the right audience. They will tell you what keywords people are using to enable them to find your website so that accordingly you can create either more content around those keywords or create less content around those keywords.
  • Edit your content: Writing, especially quality writing, is a work of passion and when you are writing passionately you tend to skip a few grammar and spelling mistakes. Even established authors have editors. Use an editing tool to write. You might already be using something like Google Docs, Microsoft Word and even OpenOffice. Pay attention to their suggestions. You can also try Hemingway Editor.
  • Rewrite existing content with new perspective: Remember that quality+quantity improve your SEO. Quantity means you need to write lots of stuff. I have observed that many content marketing and content writing blogs keep on publishing the same stuff but with different titles, different words and different links, very cleverly creating new content out of existing content. You can do the same.

The importance of content writing and content marketing in SEO

Content writing, content marketing and SEO are intertwined. You write content, then you market content and this combination of content writing and content marketing yields better SEO.

Should you do content writing just for SEO?

Sure, you can do it, but to achieve what? Companies that earn revenue from advertising may like to do that, write content just for SEO, but if you want to convert your visitors into paying customers and clients, you need to write content that converts. You want to have loyal customers and clients for your business. You can have loyal customers and clients only if you create high-quality content that engages people, delivers value, educates them and makes a mark on their subconscious.

The best way to create a balance between high quality content writing and SEO is, create high-value content, and use the right keywords.

5 ways to beat your competitors at SEO with content writing

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beating-you-competition-with-SEO-content-writing

The biggest challenge that you may face from your competitors might be on the search engines. If you want to improve your search engine rankings, you need to beat your competitors at SEO. Although you can take various actions – for example read 10 tips on how to write SEO content for your website – the best way to beat your competitors is through SEO content writing.

Why search engines-based content writing enables you to beat even your toughest competitors?

The beauty of content writing is that it makes your presence on the Internet unique. Only you can write the way you write. No matter how hard your competitors try, they cannot be “You” – only you can be “You”. This is why even smaller companies on the Internet can pose big dangers to their bigger counterparts.

What is SEO content writing and how it helps you beat your competitors?

Being a content writer often hired by clients who want to improve their search engine rankings through content writing, I have written a lot on the topic. You can read this blog post that says SEO content writing actually improves your search engine rankings or you can read Does SEO content writing improve your search engine rankings?

Anyway, there are thousands of companies on the Internet that provide you “SEO content” to help you increase search engine traffic to your website and many of these companies can actually help you.

SEO content writing in isolation doesn’t help you improve your search engine rankings – many factors play an important part. But SEO content is definitely one of the most important building blocks. It’s like, if you don’t have content, what will the search engines crawl, index and then rank? Obviously you need content.

And what sort of content gets ranked well? Good content. Well-written content. Content that is appreciated by people. Content that gets recommended. Content that people link to.

So, having good, relevant, topical, well-written and well-formatted content is a must. Everything comes after that.

Briefly, these are the 5 ways to beat your competitors at SEO with content writing:

  1. Create unique content
  2. Solve problems better than your competitors do
  3. Create content around less competitive keywords and phrases
  4. Rewrite content published by your competitors in a better manner
  5. Keep your existing content up-to-date

Now let’s go through these points one by one, in detail

1. Create unique content

Unique content automatically gives you an edge, because being unique, only you have it, or very few people have it. How does this help your SEO? On the same topic, the search engines like Google want to present different perspectives to their users so that they may find content they are not aware of, but may be useful to them. So well-written unique content is often ranked higher by search engines.

2. Solve problems better than your competitors do

This is a brute-force way of legitimately beating your competitors with better SEO content. If you solve problems better than your competitors, even if you don’t rank well, initially, compared to them, more people will visit, share, and recommend your links, eventually giving you an SEO edge over your competitors.

3. Create content around less competitive keywords and phrases

You don’t have to write content around keywords your competitors are already ranking well for. There might be many keyword variations your competitors might have ignored, or somehow couldn’t have achieved better rankings for. You can try different spellings. You can try different phrases for the same expressions. You can try bigger phrases. You can try local variations your competitors might have ignored.

Find out the keywords and phrases your competitors haven’t been able to rank well and then create good-quality content around them. This will definitely give you good search engine rankings for these less competitive keywords and search terms.

4. Rewrite content published by your competitors in a better manner

This basically is the same as point 2 but here what I mean is, you can also create the general content similar to what your competitors are creating, just in a better manner. You have the talent. You have your own unique way of writing. You can even have the same titles if you are daring enough while completely rewriting the webpages or the blog posts. Turn smaller subheadings from your competitor’s website into complete webpages of your own. You can even create multiple webpages out of a single webpage, or combine multiple pages into a single webpage or blog post.

5. Keep your existing content up-to-date

Google likes to present its search results fresh out of the oven. If your content becomes stale, if it grows old, Google begins to ignore it in favor of newer webpages and blog posts.

Make updating your existing content an integral part of your SEO content writing strategy. Whatever webpages and blog posts that your have created, are your business assets. Keep track of them. Monitor them individually. Don’t just forget about them once your have created them. Revisit them to check whether there is some reason to update them or revise them. Even if you feel like changing a few sentences, changes them and the resubmit the link to Google.

Beating your competitors with SEO content writing might not be easy, and it may even prove to be a challenge, but if you want to take them up on this challenge, with strategy and hard-working, nothing should stop you.

10 tips on how to write SEO content for your website

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how-to-write-seo-content-for-your-websiteContrary to popular beliefs – mostly propagated by snakeoil SEO Experts – SEO content for your website is not a different entity. It is not something that you write or publish specifically to improve your search engine rankings.

In fact, if you are publishing content just to improve your SEO without paying scant regard to how your content converts (how it helps you grow your business), you are just like that proverbial dog chasing its proverbial tail. You go round and round, but nothing much happens, and then you wonder, why nothing much happens?

But it doesn’t mean there is no such thing as SEO content. If you want to improve your search engine rankings then you have to pay attention to creating and publishing search engine friendly content that is ranked well by major search engines like Google and Bing. You need to know how to write SEO content for your website and for your blog.

Although just good content doesn’t guarantee better SEO, it is the first step, and first step is always very crucial. After all, if you don’t have content, what’s the search engines going to rank? In order to enjoy good search engine rankings, aside from knowing how to write SEO content for your website, you also need to

  • Publish content regularly over a long period of time
  • Become an authority in your field so that lots of people link to your content
  • Get your content shared on social media and social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and the others

In order for your website to enjoy good search engine rankings, all these activities should go on as a collective effort.

But the focus of this blog post is to know how to write SEO content for your website.

The highlights of these 10 points are:

  1. Define the objective of the webpage
  2. Narrow the topic as much as possible
  3. Try to pack as much information as possible
  4. Thoroughly research your keywords
  5. Optimize for longer phrases
  6. Use headings and sub- headings to organize text
  7. Link to pre-existing pages
  8. Provide answers to questions
  9. Pay close attention to accessibility
  10. Make your webpages as fast-loading as possible

These individual points are explained in detail below…

1. Define the objective of the web page

This is very important. Why are you creating the webpage that you are creating, or the blog post that you are creating? What is the most important message that you want to convey? What sort of information do you want to give to your prospective customers and clients? The webpage should have an aim. It should provide some sort of value to people to find the link on search engines.

When people are trying to write lots of SEO content for their website, this is the aspect that they often overlook. They simply go on publishing lots of webpages hoping that it would improve their search engine rankings. This can have an adverse effect. If you don’t have an objective, how do you think search engines can know what exactly you are trying to do? They need to know it clearly in order to be able to highlight your link in front of the users. If you aimlessly publish content, your SEO credentials will be diluted and your subject-related authority will be undermined.

2. Narrow the topic as much as possible

The narrower the topic, the better will be its SEO prospects. For example, what does this blog post do? It tells you how to write SEO content for your website. It briefly explains that SEO content isn’t the only thing that can give you better search engine rankings, but the topic or the title of the blog post clearly defines what I intend to do. This way, if the search engines decide to rank this blog post, their algorithms will know exactly for what they should rank it: people who want to learn how to write SEO content for their websites.

3. Try to pack as much information as possible

Longer webpages and blog posts are preferred over shorter webpages and blog posts by the search engines these days. This is because writing longer webpages requires effort. Spammers don’t want to spend much effort when creating pages. There was a time when they would simply copy/paste a few paragraphs and that would improve their search engine rankings. Not now. The webpages and blog posts should be well-researched, giving lots of information to the readers. In fact, it’s better if your webpages and blog posts are multi-paged. This way you may be forced to publish fewer webpages and blog posts, but their impact would be much better than smaller webpages and blog posts.

4. Thoroughly research your keywords

Although many discount this, keywords are still important. Most of the search engines these days can rank your webpages and blog posts according to your central message, but irrespective of what language you use, you still need to take care of your keywords.

Keywords are the words that carry the true meaning of your message. They are the words people will be using to look for the content you want them to find. For example, there is a great chance you are reading this blog post after searching for how to write SEO content for websites.

Whether you want to use jargon or not, depends on your audience. Most important is, use phrases and words your prospective customers and clients are most likely to use in order to be able to find your webpage or blog post.

Make sure that the use of keywords and phrases is natural. Use the keywords when they seem like a part of your writing. Don’t force them. The search engine algorithms are so smart these days that they can easily make out if you are needlessly creating excuses for repeatedly using your keywords and phrases. The density of the keywords shouldn’t be over 3-4%.

Definitely use your main keyword phrase in the title.

5. Optimize for longer phrases

People don’t use single keywords. They use sentences and phrases. When people are searching for something, they are prone to asking questions, especially these days when many might be using voice when using search engines, instead of typing their queries. The gist is that people use a combination of three or four words to do searches.

6. Use headings and sub-headings to organize text

Using headings and sub-headings makes it easier for people to quickly scan your content in case they don’t want to read everything. After reading the headlines and the bullet points you can get a fair idea of what I’m trying to say in this blog post.

Whenever possible, try to use your keywords and main phrases in headings and sub-headings.

7. Link to pre-existing pages

If you have links to webpages and blog posts that you have created before, you can link to them from the new webpage or blog post you are creating. This not only encourages people to check out other links on your website, it also makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index more links from your website. Remember that the more links Google can crawl and index from your website, the more SEO significance it gives to your website.

When you link to other webpages and blog posts from you website, use appropriate hyperlink text. This adds weightage to your keywords. For example, if I use the phrase “content marketing”, instead of writing it plainly, I can hyperlink it in such manner: content marketing.

Two things will happen…people visiting this link may also visit the content marketing link, and the search engine crawlers will know that I have more content dedicated to the phrase “content marketing”.

8. Provide answers to questions

Most of the people search for how, why, what, when, who and where. Formulate your SEO content in such a manner that you provide answers to people’s questions. Solve problems and this improves your search engine rankings.

Another benefit of answering questions and solving specific problems is that it helps you narrow down your topic and this in turn helps your SEO. Also, people tend to share the best answers to their questions on social networking website, further boosting your rankings. Search engines like Google favor websites that are large repositories of questions and answers.

9. Pay close attention to accessibility

Accessible content is good content according to the search engines. Don’t hide your content under JavaScript lawyers. When using images use captions that properly describe the images. Use the alt text attribute to indicate what information the image hold.

If you are using dynamic menus use CSS because then the menus can be accessed even when just the text of your website is being accessed.

The accessibility conventions have been formulated in such a manner that if you follow them your website automatically becomes search engine friendly, and so does your content.

10. Make your webpage as fast loading as possible

Yes, even in the times of broadband, how fast your webpage loads, matters.

An Akamai study has concluded that 40% of your visitors may leave your website if your webpages don’t completely load within 3 seconds. It’s an old study, but its significance still stands.

Want to know how fast your individual webpages and blog posts load? Try loading them via Pingdom.com.

In fact, the speedy availability of your content is so important that Facebook has launched Instant Articles so that articles and blog posts can be immediately loaded on mobile phones.

So these are the 10 most important tips on how to write SEO content for your website.

Again, when you are writing content for your website, good SEO should be a byproduct of good writing. If you follow good formatting practices, if you write useful, relevant content, you automatically write SEO content.

How to strike a balance between SEO and quality content writing

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balancing-quality-content-writing-and-seo-content-writingI’m writing this blog post because people ask about this: how to create SEO content while maintaining the quality of the content? But they are not separate. If you practice quality content writing, the SEO part handled on its own.

These days, SEO doesn’t mean creating keyword-rich content. I don’t mean to say that you don’t use your keywords when writing content, because keywords are important. But they are not the only thing that matter. Other things that matter are:

  1. The quality of your content writing.
  2. The depth of information and wisdom that you have shared.
  3. The usefulness of your content writing.
  4. The approval and endorsement that it attracts from people.
  5. The collective competition your content writing faces.
  6. The quantity of quality content writing that already exists on your website or blog.

All these attributes are necessary to get good search engine rankings. Without them, no matter how hard you focus on your keywords, you’re not going to get much headway.

As I have written above, keywords matter. If you are spending sleepless nights thinking how to strike a balance between SEO and quality content writing, here are a few things you can do to give yourself some peace of mind:

  1. Create a list of your primary and secondary keywords. Take a printout of them. Keep them in front of you when creating content for your blog or website so that you never lose sight of them.
  2. Create vertically focused webpages and blog posts. Don’t try to cramp too much into a single webpage or blog post. Handle one topic at a time and pack as much information as possible on that one topic. Create bulleted lists discussing various aspects of the topic. Create hyperlinks wherever possible. Make ample use of headlines and sub headlines. Provide as much information as possible without sounding repetitive. Don’t insert needless sentences just to accommodate your keywords. Your keywords will be covered if you already talk about your subject.
  3. Give precedence to quality content writing. When you are preparing your first draft focus on the quality. Write well. Collect all the information you can collect. Create concise, simple sentences. Organise the information in a scannable manner. Use a language that your core audience can understand. What I mean to say is, totally focus on quality in the first draft.
  4. Then, strategically, start inserting your keyword. They must appear natural. Try to create headlines and some headlines with your keywords. Try to use your keywords in the information that you present in bulleted form. When linking to other webpages and blog posts on your website through hyperlinks, use your keywords in the anchor text. When inserting images, name your images using your keywords. Use your keywords in the alt text of your images.

There is only this much you can do to “SEO” your content writing. Mostly it depends on the quality of your writing and the competition your writing faces.