With SEO Good Writing Matters
These days, writing content that is optimized for the search engines is about more than just including keywords in the content. In fact, too many keywords in your writing can hurt more than help. These days, it’s good writing that really matters. Not only that, but you also need to please two audiences – your human visitors and the search engines. Too often, when people write content online, they write for one or the other, never both. This may seem like a lot to think about, but the idea is simple – focus on your writing and the SEO will fall into place.
How do you define “good writing” by Internet standards? Here’s some advice:
Understand What Good Writing Is
What makes you want to read an article online? Most of us know what good writing looks like because it’s grammatically correct and well structured. However, there’s more to it than that from a business standpoint. Good writing fills a need, engages the reader, and serves an ultimate purpose. Each piece of content has the potential to drive traffic, increase conversions, and increase your brand identity. Simply put, the writing was good if it served at least one of these purposes.
Meet Their Expectations
When writing your content, how do you know when it’s finished? Basically, if you feel as if you’ve covered all aspects of your chosen topic, the article is complete. Search engines don’t want to see “thin content” that has no substance. Readers need to feel as if you met their needs. When they search for information online, they have certain expectations.
For example, if they’re looking for a review of a product, they expect that if they find your article by searching for the product review online, they expect that you’ll deliver on this expectation. If you’ve covered all aspects of the topic and have satisfied the expectations of your reader, you know the article is completed. This is a perfect example of where both SEO and effective writing work together.
Incorporate Keywords Sparingly
Search engine algorithms are sophisticated. Most content writers craft optimized content without even realizing it. In fact, this is the way it should be. Search engines are concerned with meeting people’s expectations when they search for content. Their goal is to deliver the highest quality, most relevant results possible in the search results. Overusing keywords lowers the quality of your article and this is something that search engines pay attention to. If your content is “over-optimized” it could actually prevent your content from being seen.
The solution, then, is to focus each article topic around one concentrated topic. From there, your writing will naturally weave in the keywords needed to get the content noticed by the search engines. If you must use keywords, use then sparingly. As an added bonus, content that is written this way is much more shareable on the social networks and this added engagement may help increase overall search engine ranks.
Categorized in: SEO
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