How to write for search engines:
Here are a few tips on how to write for search engines, while still making the text human readable.
Writing for search engines is a careful process of inserting keywords into content while still keeping the human entertained.
Let’s face it, not to long ago learned from IBM’s Watson on Jeopardy is that computers don’t really get human language. Search engines use thousands of different algorithms to crawl and index website content. We don’t know what those algorithms are, but because we are SEO Professionals we can figure out how to make them work in our favor!
Content is King (only if it’s unique)
This we already know, well because we are search engine marketers, right? Especially with Google’s recent farmer update, which basically eliminated a huge chunk of duplicate content
and how it dominated ranking in the search engine results page. You can’t just start writing and expect it to be the very best search engine friendly content there is. It’s just not possible. You’re going to find out that the more you write, the more natual it feels writing for search engines.
First Step to Writing for Search Engines
Titles are very important when writing for search engines. They are the first item that is read, and are usually at the top of the page. If you don’t put titles at the top of your website, I suggest you
do that right away, and get used to it, because it needs to be done this way each time. When writing titles for search engines you need to use keywords and keyword phrases relevant the rest of the text
you are about to write out.
Utilize the Heading Tag
Search engine crawlers love heading tags. This shows the content you are writing conveys structure and clearly tells the reader what it is they are reading. When writing for search engines the Heading tag
needs to stay relevant to the page. Search engine crawlers have algorithms that work best on one concept at a time.
Balancing SEO Content Writing
Every where you look there are tips for SEO. There are a ton of SEO blogs out there, all offering their view of how search engines work. What these blogs and articles forget to convey is that
writing for search engines requires a delicate balance of content and keywords. The general rule of thumb is one-hundred words for every keyword. That doesn’t mean you must have exactly one-hundred words, then
insert a keyword or keyword phrase. It basically tells you not to over-stuff your keywords into your content or search engine crawlers will consider your SEO Copy-writing to be spam, and the human element will
see your content as dull. You don’t want either one to happen.
Consistency for writing
It’s always good to start with an outline of what you will be writing about. The first thing I do is think of the Title of the page or the Topic I am trying to project in my articles. Then I put the title
on the piece of paper and start from there. The next thing I do is break down my topic into about 3-5 subtopics. You have just created your heading tags! Then I put the Title into the web page or blog article
and skip a few lines between the headings I just created. I list the headings out and fill relevant content in between. Trying to remember that I need at least one-hundred words in between keywords and keyword
phrases. It definitely helps when writing for search engines to start on a piece of paper.
Wrapping up
As search engine marketers we already know that SEO needs to be balanced. Part of that precious balance is writing for search engines, or SEO copy-writing as it’s commonly called. If you
keep working at it and using analytic’s to measure your blog articles statistics such as Twitter mentions or Facebook “likes” you can try different way’s of writing to see what works best for you.
