If you’re ready to put pen to paper (or, more likely fingers to the keys), then you’ll be looking for tips to make your writing SEO friendly. With just a few pieces of knowledge, you can instantly elevate your writing to something more likely to be found by search engines. Here are our top 5 tips for making your writing SEO friendly:
1. Use titles and headings:
Web-reading is not the same as a novel – either for your audience or Google’s spiders. It needs to be broken up. Space is vital.
Titles and headings matter at this level alone. However, the use of sub-headings is also important. This is because Mr Robot ‘reading’ the page places higher priorities on sub-headings than on body text.
2. Know how to use keywords:
If you’ve paid to have some keyword research done (or put in the effort yourself), you’ll want to use it wisely. This is where it can get a bit tricky. You see, no-one actually knows the rules here, no matter what they tell you.
What we do know is that there are some basic concepts. Don’t try to target every keyword on your list in one piece of writing. Select one or two. Secondly, use them naturally, as they fit. Don’t force them.
Try to position the keyword once in the first paragraph and once in the last. Then try to scatter it, as seems natural, in the body of the text. Don’t go in heavy-handed. That’s called keyword stuffing and it’ll do the opposite of what you want. It’ll flag up to Google that this is bad content and send you to the back of the line.
3. Make it relevant:
Google want their search results to be useful to their users. Therefore, the more relevant your piece is to those finding you, the better your ranking will be. If your keywords are doing a great job of getting visitors to your page, but they only stay there for a few seconds, it’s off to the back of the line again.
What’s more, you want the visited content to be relevant and useful, not just for SEO purposes. If your content is engaging and valuable to your visitors, they will act on it. Whether that’s a matter of building your brand authority, or actually making a purchase – that’s valuable stuff.
4. Use a call-to-action:
Internet readers kind of like to be spoon-fed. After all, why should they put in the effort when someone else will make it easy for them?
Therefore, make sure you know what your call-to-action is for each piece of content. It often indirectly feeds through to great SEO. It will point your reader to where you want them to go next.
5. Keep optimising:
So many people make the mistake of thinking SEO writing is a lob-it-and-hope approach. You can’t just leave your piece of content once it’s posted. It’s called ‘optimisation’ precisely because it’s a process of refinement.
Use your website metrics to measure what is working. Go back to great pages and freshen them up and add to them. With weaker pages either start again, or go in all guns blazing.
There’s a great deal more to becoming a SEO writing pro. However, these quick tips should give you a great head start. Keep following our blog to learn more about content marketing and SEO writing.
Chris Brown is chief copywriter at The Content Ninja. With a focus on SEO strategy paired with powerful writing, The Content Ninja does content marketing differently.
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