What Is SEO Writing?

A Look at SEO Writing

SEO Writing – How Familiar?

SEO writing is something you may have already heard of. When we start writing content for a website and look for tips that can help us gather more traffic through our content, SEO always shows up. But what really is SEO and how can we write content so that it can really achieve the purposes of SEO, which is to lift a website in terms of search engine rankings and make the website more visible to the wide internet public?

Keyword Research

Keywords are the heart of SEO writing. Keywords are words or phrases related to your intended website content. These keywords are also the words that web users are very likely to enter when they begin searching for information related to the topic of your website. For example, you have a website for selling power tools.

Relevant keywords include “power tools”, “buy power tools”, “power tools for sale”, “buy power tools for sale”, “power tools shop”, “shop power tools”, and many more. The SEO writer should include these keywords in the write-ups and articles they’ll be posting on their website.

When a Web user types any of these keywords in the search engine, this individual’s website will now show up higher in the results page. Showing up in page 1 of the search engine results page is a must – less than 1% of users go beyond page 1 while viewing search engine results.

Local SEO

Keyword research may be good, but there’s more to be done. Let’s go back to the power tools website we were talking about. Remember that power tools website is competing with other power tools websites all over the world. Many of these websites also underwent SEO refinements; so, the website is facing stiff competition from the whole world.

How can we take care of that? Let us ask ourselves one question so fundamental in marketing: Who are your primary clients? For an owner of a small power tools website, conquering the world is highly impractical, especially in the face of tough worldwide competition. But how about trying to meet the needs of clients in the immediate locality?

That’s a more manageable maneuver. Let’s say that the locality is Toronto, Canada. You just have to change your keywords a bit, e.g. “power tools Toronto”, “Toronto power tools”, “power tools shop Toronto”, “power tools for sale Toronto”, “Toronto power tools for sale”, etc. While you may not stand a chance at the world market, you can obtain plenty of clients from your locality, and these clients will be a constant source of profits.

Updating Is a Must

Suppose your website already contains plenty of write-ups. Can that make your website’s search engine rankings high? Don’t count on it just yet. While having write-ups are good, you have to constantly update the content on your website. Fresh content is immediately indexed by search engines, and if there are good keywords, then your website will hold its own value against the competition for search engine visibility. Check out the SEOmoz article on how fresh content can influence rankings to understand better.

Search engines ignore websites that stagnate over time. And with stagnant content, even if your website is still on the first page of the search engine results page, no visitors will come because they always want fresh content. If it’s 2012 already, how would you feel if you land on a website which was last updated in the year 2009?

You Can’t Go Overboard with Keywords

It is right to place keywords for SEO purpose. However, you may think right now of something like placing two instances of keyword phrases in every sentence of an article. Never, ever do that in SEO. Search engines can identify which websites have too many keywords in their articles without offering information of satisfactory quality to the world. And they penalize such websites; their search engine rankings can be reduced. In some cases, these websites can even get banned from search engines.

Now, let’s ask: How much is too much when it comes to placing keywords for SEO purpose? The rule is: try to make your web content as humanly written as possible, then you can have the keywords comprise 2-5% of your article. For example, if the percentage of keywords in your article (also called keyword density) is 3% and your article contains 1000 words, you need 3% of 1000 = 30 instances of the keywords in your article. Keywords are best used in moderation.

After SEO – Be Informative and Persuasive

Now that you have done SEO writing successfully (or you may have hired someone to do it skilfully for your website) and have managed to generate visitors to your website, it is now time to out whether your content is informative and persuasive. Will the content be successful in imparting useful information to other people?

Also, if your website is a promotion website, can you get people to buy your products for sale? The first part of writing web content – getting visitors to your website – is done by SEO; the second part – getting visitors to stay and to trust you and your website – is accomplished through high-quality content. However, the first always comes before the second; so, you’ll need the best of both worlds.