SEO Content Writing — a Brief Primer
This concise blog post on SEO Content Writing is meant to give you a very basic/starting idea of what the whole process entails — as it is enacted in typical Pakistani office settings (and elsewhere around the world).
Furthermore, it provides an outline of my cursory (yet budding) understanding of this vibrant discipline of digital marketing — and hints at the potential of utilizing SEO for pursuing one’s personal ambitions towards gaining a certain measure of popularity online.
By forming an understanding of the structural workings behind this crucial online marketing practice, you can not only produce great articles & blogs that continue to rank well, but which also enhance your personal web-based writing profile (as a corollary).
A totally win-win scenario — provided you’re willing to put in a little amount of word & research-oriented effort. And some portion of your precious time, of course (it need not be stated!).
So what constitutes SEO Content?
SEO (Search Engine Optimized) Content is simply any composition of words — primarily in the English language (though not always) — strategically tailored in a way that makes it more visible in SERPs (search engine result pages).
Nowadays, Google happens to be the main web platform on which bloggers, marketing experts, and all manner of SEO analysts & technicians try to promote their commercial interests organically (for free) — thereby cutting back substantially on traditional advertising costs (the infamous ‘adspend’).
They do this by trying to strengthen their keyword & backlinking game — which together constitute two of the main pillars on which the ‘off-site’ part of SEO stands. There are, of course, other SEO content ranking factors to contend with; for a writer hoping to aim high. But we won’t be getting into them at this initial stage in our discussion.
SEO Content, according to its teleological (can’t help but be a little philosophical about it) function, is designed to be web-crawler friendly — meaning that Google finds it easy to index under its sprawling categories of search terms (which, incidentally, are the same keywords inserted at certain strategic places in the final optimized text — in accordance with the dictates of another popular ranking factor).
Backlinks can be likened to virtual votes of authenticity/credibility, in that they signal to Google that a particular richly-linked webpage — with many other peer and third-party pages having formed linkages to it — should be treated as a more reputable source of information than those that lack the same advantage (even though the opposite might actually be the case!).
In this aspect, search engines could be said to suffer (by way of a crude analogy) from the same debilitating quality-failing that is the de facto Achilles heel of social democracy — where a demographically-based popularity may not necessarily equate with (ethical &) rightful validity.
A bit too much to process all at once?
Also, no two backlinks may be the same. Links from higher domain authority (DA) sites command significantly higher search engine and user attention — and therefore result in higher rankings in contrast to their low-DA linking counterparts.
Some Neat SEO Writing Tricks
Attaining the right keywords (against which you’re hoping to appear in Google’s search results) is absolutely crucial to ranking well — and overall effective SEO writing. Choosing appropriate keywords, in turn, depends on your personal and/or commercial intent (on why you’re writing whatever the heck it is you’re writing in the first place!).
Once you narrow-in on the right K.W’s — using Google’s popular Keyword Planner tool, for instance — you can start incorporating them by adhering to the ‘once in the article heading; once in the subheading; once in the main text body’ rule of thumb. A good practice is to insert the keyword (which, as a misnomer, can consist of an entire phrase sometimes) once in every 100 to 150-worded paragraph.
Your focus K.W normally dictates the content-orientation of your entire composition, and so it should feature as near the top of your written content as possible. What this means is that it should be placed (ideally) once in the topic statement (heading/H1), and once in the starting sentence of the article.
Another good practice is to complement the focus K.W with a variant (or two) — the duo or trio of which collectively reinforces the relevancy of your written production against a Google search query. This signals to the search engine that it should preferentially show your work over other contenders using the same strategies to rank.
Including appropriate Headings and Subheadings — H2s & beyond - (again cautiously incorporating K.Ws), along with pictures, also serves to heighten the user-experience related to spectating your work.
You should never, however, attempt to stuff your content with keywords — otherwise you run the risk of having your work blacklisted by Google.
Also, don’t forget that what you’re writing is ultimately meant for a human audience — and humans, by their very spontaneous and shifty nature, have very hard-to-retain attention spans (as you will probably be aware of!).
So if you want your content to fare well with the mercurial focus of the predominant earthly species at large, it would be highly beneficial if you gave the first priority (when writing) to the readable quality of your written production, and the second to good SEO tweaking. Don’t tell me you didn’t get annoyed by reading this sentence?
See my point?
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As stated at the very outset, this article was meant to provide you with a beginner’s understanding of SEO Content Writing.
For more detailed readings on this exciting and absorbing (and, of course, monetarily profitable — if you’re thinking big enough) subject, do check out the industry-acclaimed resources on SEO & SEM published on the Moz and Search Engine Land websites.
Happy Optimizing!