There may have been a time when you could write awkward, poor SEO content full of keywords and it wouldn’t hurt your ranking. Those days are OVAH, my friend. These days, you will want to write good, readable, informative content (with a keyword or two included once in a while) to get the best results. Remember: You’re writing for an audience of real people just as much for the search engines.
So! With that, here are a few tips for your Web content to not suck and to be search engine-friendly:
- Good Content Is King: Ok, this is, like, so obvious, isn’t it? Yeah, you’re right. But the fact is: There are TONS and ACRES and MILES of terrible web content out there that is hard to read, uninformative and jammed full of keywords. Hey, this isn’t 2001, guys! Content needs to be readable! Writing informative, easy to read webpage content, articles, and blog posts are the best way to create a strong web presence both for your readers and the search engines. If what you write is actually interesting, people also will share it via Facebook and other social media, too.
- Stay Focused: If you are writing for your personal blog about your pet snake, sure, it’s fine to ramble and go off on tangents. But if you are writing for a business website, keep it professional. Stay on whatever business topic that the site is designed for. If you drift off into unrelated topics, visitors will come in from the search engines, get confused, and bail.
- Write Strong Headlines: I could have titled this piece, Effective Copywriting. But I didn’t. Why? Because, frankly, that’s boring as hell. You want to write headlines and headings that grab attention of your readers, and the search engines too. Search engines love it if you put keywords right up front in the title and in the first line, which I did, with my headline 5 Ways to Create SEO Content That Doesn’t Suck.
- Don’t Overdo Keywords: As I mentioned earlier, keyword stuffing went out ages ago. When you are writing your SEO content, you should just throw in a related keyword once a paragraph or so. If you have your primary keywords in a 500 word article more than a few times, you’re overdoing it.
- Write Unique Content: You’d think this would go without saying, but you see copied content all over the place. You can use copyscape to see if you content is copied. This does not help your ranking, and oh by the way, it’s sorta illegal! It doesn’t take a lot of effort to rewrite content and make it completely unique.