5 - Making Your Content Writing Search Engine Friendly

Making Your Content Writing Search Engine Friendly

Write for People, Not Search Engines

The ultimate goal of any search engine optimization (SEO) campaign is to achieve long-standing, organic rankings with popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Although content is not the only thing that search-engine algorithms take into consideration when ranking a web site, content is arguably the most important. Therefore, if your goal is to obtain high organic rankings for your web site, you must produce high-quality, original content that contains the keywords that you want to rank for.

Write Original, Persuasive, and Natural Content

If your content is original, persuasive, and has a natural tone, search engines tend to recognize it as worthwhile and therefore rank it positively. Conversely, if your content is overly stuffed with keywords and the only purpose of the content is to manipulate search-engine results, search engines will eventually remove your content from their index, in which case it will no longer appear in the search results. Packing too many keywords into your content creates an awkward tone and unnatural flow.

Structure Your Content with Your Reader in Mind

It is enormously important to outline and structure your content to be as helpful and informative as possible. Your content must address the gamut of possible questions and concerns your readers may have regarding your product, service or message.

Writing distinctly helpful and user-friendly content makes your page appealing to humans and search engines alike. Before writing any content, ask yourself some questions: What are the benefits of the product, message or service? What concerns would I have as a consumer or reader? What is truly exceptional about this product? By answering these types of questions, you alleviate any confusion or apprehensions your reader may have regarding your product, increasing your chances of conversion. People and search engines alike value comprehensive, useful information, not slogans and vague appraisals.

Avoid Poor Grammar

The search-engine spiders are aware that clumsy sentences and poor grammar are displeasing to human readers; therefore, your grammar should be of the highest caliber. Search engines tend to devalue any content containing awkward sentences, clichés, erroneous grammar, or writing considered aesthetically abrasive to a reader. By keeping your story elegant and distinctive, you increase your web site’s chance of attainting high search-engine rankings. It is also important to keep your content accessible to the average reader.

Do not alienate the average reader by writing in a style more befitting to a doctoral dissertation than a web page. However, content that comes across as elementary is going to generate minimal excitement and make your site look unprofessional. The key to writing accessible yet impressive content is determining the level at which your target audience reads.

Write Useful and Informative Content

It is important that your content be informative, concise, and easy to navigate. Readers on the web are said to have an exceptionally short attention span. For this reason, write in a concise manner and use headings, subheadings, bold type, and similar formatting that illustrate the information contained in each subsequent section of your page.

Start all subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points with information-carrying words or action phrases that users can notice while scanning down your content. Keep in mind that users visit your web site with a specific objective in mind. Readily accessible information increases the reader’s chances of achieving an objective in a timely fashion. Readers are more likely to purchase or subscribe to your product or service if you make it easy for them.

Write a Compelling Headline

As I wrote in my article “10 Indispensable SEO Content Writing Tips!”, the headlines to the articles you write are crucial… you have less than 10 seconds to attract the user’s attention. Your headline is around “90 percent of the reason anyone will read your ad copy,” so make sure your title will interest the reader enough to pull them in immediately, while clearly explaining the content. Placing a keyword into the headline is also a great idea.

Use Bold-Type Headings

Provide bold-type headings that inform on the nature of each subsection, affording the reader on overview of the site’s benefits at a glance. Furnishing readers with easily accessible, detailed information is the best way to keep them reading.

Many inexperienced copywriters make the mistake of writing their material in one large block of content without headings that grab the reader’s attention. Some readers are looking for specific information, and consider the task of reading the giant blocks of content to be too time consuming.

Write with an Original Voice

The process of becoming a skilled writer includes paying special attention to the originality of the writing. Originality requires you to make certain that your voice is the most powerful component of the content. Even if you are writing content that is technical in nature, you need to spend time to understand the material well enough to explain to the reader with your own voice.
Writing with an original voice makes your content valuable to search engines and naturally compelling to readers. Writing in a manner natural to you translates as natural to your audience.

Write Interesting Content in a Friendly Tone

Use the tone of your writing to capture your readers’ attention and keep them interested in your work. Employing a friendly tone in your writing will result in a positive response from virtually all your readers. You can use a friendly tone and humor in your copy to make your web site more personal and engaging. One of your main goals is to keep readers engaged long enough for them to read all the facts; the best way to accomplish this goal is to entertain while informing.
Keep your content interesting and persuasive, and you will be pleased to find that not only people but also search engines will enjoy it. It is a fact that the vast majority of content that is ranked on the front page of major search engines tends to be the content that is deemed most valuable and interesting to readers. Therefore, write quality content that people like, and search engines will rank it accordingly.

Content Writing Length

There are many opinions out there about the length of content that search engines like. I don’t believe that there is any magical number, but I personally believe that the ideal length would be anywhere from 300 to 1200 words. As an example, this lesson has a little over 2500 words according to the ‘word count’.

If you are writing for article submissions to directories such as EzineArticles.com, they will suggest that an ideal article size is 400-750 words, but no more than 5,000 words, as stated in their editorial guidelines. Many of these article submission sites will give guidelines to what they would like to see from you.

While you are writing your article, make sure to use keyword anchor text leading to other articles on your site as described in 4 – Optimizing Your Site with Tags! – Anchor Text

What’s the Right Keyword Density for Your Article?

The exact keyword density is hard to specify. It’s a measurement of the number of times that your keywords appear on the page versus the number of words on a page… a ratio, in other words.
A rule of thumb about keyword density would be to make sure your keyword or keyword phrase is in the title tag, the description and the H1 tag at minimum. Make sure you sprinkle a few variations of your keyword(s) throughout your site where it looks natural and makes sense as we spoke about in 2 – Keywords and Your Web Site!”- LSI keyword research.
Make sure you don’t abuse the system by keyword stuffing, which are too many keywords or a large amount of keyword phrases in your site’s text. Google will penalize you for this because it represents SPAM!
I have written an article about keyword density, in which I will leave the link at the end of this lesson. Make sure you read this article, because it will go into greater depth about keyword density, and ways of pleasing the search engines that others don’t know about, which will set you apart from the competition.

Avoid Duplicate Content

Another subject to touch on about content writing is duplicate content and the consequences for the identical content. Instead of getting in-depth about how to avoid duplicate content issues and their penalties, it would be much easier for you to read the article that I have written about the subject.
Once you have read the article about duplicate content, make sure you follow the link to Canonical Issues which is a whole other story about duplicate content. In my article, I will show you ways to avoid this issue for your blog.

Keeping Your Content Fresh

Content is also an element of SEO that needs to be maintained over time. Your content should change regularly… in some cases, that means every day; in others it means once a week or once a month. Even more important than the schedule with which you change your content is the content itself.
Over time you should be adding to your collection of relevant, useful content. If what you have on the site isn’t relevant or useful, then replace it… and don’t put any piece of content on your site that doesn’t give your visitors something useful. When adding new pages, you should also be adding internal page anchor text links making your site user-friendly.

Keyword-Enriched Web Site Makeover with Permalinks & the 301 Redirect!

STEP 1 – If you happen to be using the original WordPress ‘Default’ permalink as shown below, I would recommend that you change your permalink setting to the Custom Structure with the following word /%postname%/ in the box. What this will do for you is put your title wording into the URL instead of numbers. If your existing title (the title from the first time you saved the post) to your page has keywords in them, they will now show in the URL address bar, giving you an SEO advantage. When you make the change, your site links should continue to work, but it is always a good idea to check your links to make sure.

Once you have made this change and checked to make sure your links work correctly, it’s time to move on to the next step.

STEP 2 – If you would like to make changes to the URL file name (the string of words which are beyond the last forward slash “/” of your web site address) of any or all pages because they don’t contain your keywords, then you will have to do what is called a ‘301 redirect’ for each page that you decide to change.

Here’s an example of this page’s file name from the address bar above: /making-content-writing-search-engine-friendly-lesson-5/. This file name is purposely long for descriptive purposes during these lessons… if you look at any of my other pages that are not part of these lessons, they will contain only keywords or keyword phrases in the URL file name.
The reason that you will need to do a 301 redirect for any pages you decide to change are: most likely you have links out there in cyberspace that lead to your existing page(s), so you will need to re-direct those old pages to the new page.

Here is the 301 Redirect Plug-in for WordPress that I would recommend:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-301-redirects/ .

Once you install the plug-in and active it, you can find the 301 editor screen under Settings > 301 Redirects in the WordPress admin dashboard. You must be an administrator to edit your list of new redirects.

IMPORTANT: Before you make the change to a page’s file name, be sure to document the Top-Level part of the URL to place into the 301 redirect ‘Request’ box as shown below. The top-level part of the URL is the forward slash “/” along with the words that directly follow the domain name.

Example: If my domain URL shows “http://seoblogtips.com/seo-blog-tips/”, then the top level part of the URL would be the “/seo-blog-tips/”. If your URL has the WordPress blog installed into a folder (with the name “blog”, or any other folder name), example: http://seoblogtips.com/blog/seo-blog-tips/, then the top level would be “/blog/seo-blog-tips/”.

I know I’m repeating myself, but I can’t stress the importance enough… make sure you copy the top-level of the wording exactly as it appears in the address bar, including the forward slash “/” directly after the .com, .net. or .org, etc. to put into the ‘Request’ box… then put the new keyword-enriched complete URL into the ‘Destination’ box as shown and click Save Changes.


If you would like to learn more about a 301 Redirect, you can read my article on the subject:
http://seoblogoptimizer.com/301-redirect/ .

Below is a photo which shows the location to do the URL changes in your Edit Post box, if you choose to take on Step 2. All you need to do is click on the ‘Edit’ button, delete the old words, then add your main keyword or keyword phrase only, separating each word with a hyphen.

NOTE: When you do this step to create a newly keyword-enriched URL, do not add any additional words other than your keyword or keyword phrase… it will actually help your SEO efforts to leave out non-relevant words.

Here is a Plug-in to Compliment Step 2 (the 301 Redirect)

If you plan to do this work in step 2, then consider the following WordPress plug-in called SEO Slugs, located at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-slugs/!

What the SEO Slugs WordPress plugin does for you is remove the common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs (in a nutshell, the URL that I am talking about in Step 2) to improve search engine optimization.

For example, when you publish a post with a title like this: “What You Can Do Immediately For Higher Rankings”, WordPress automatically assigns a long filename to your post, called a post slug: /what-you-can-do-immediately-for-higher-rankings/.

SEO Slugs plugin strips common words like “what”, “you” or “can” out of your post slug to make it more search engine friendly. With SEO Slugs plug-in activated, the slug for our example blog post would look like this: /immediately-higher-rankings/

The slug is generated on automatic saving of draft (so you get a chance to look at it before publishing, and change it), or on publish.

One last NOTE about this plug-in: This plug-in has been tested compatible up to WordPress: 2.1.2, yet I am using it currently with my 3.0.1 version with no problems at all. I have been using this plug-in for a while now, so I thought I’d try it out on my Test Blog to see if it would automatically change the URL on an existing article to the shorter version as described above, and it did not.

What I am saying is that you will need to change the URL manually for existing articles, as I mentioned above. After the plug-in has been installed and activated, it will shorten your URL for any new articles that you write.

You’re on a Roll… Don’t Stop: If you know that changing the URL structure in Step 2 is of great SEO importance, then you need to consider setting aside some time to redo all of your highly important ‘Title tags’ using the All in One SEO Pack plug-in as described in 4 – Optimizing Your Site with Tags! – All in One SEO Pack – tags solution. While you are at it, you might as well fill in the description and the keywords section too.

Ping Your Blog When You Have Added Content or Updated Your Blog

Ping services allow you to automatically notify blog directories and search engines that your blog has been updated.

There are a few reasons that you should ping your blog… whenever a blog pings, many background processes happen which will get your blog quickly indexed by search engines as well as bring traffic from many other sources.

WordPress is known to ping your site by default each and every time you click on the Update button. This can cause a red flag for the search engines as spam, and possibly get your site banned. The solution to this issue is to add the plug-in MaxBlogPress, that will allow you to update your page within a period of time that you specify, without your site being pinged each time you click the Update button.

With this plug-in, you can add a large amount of ping sites to the MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer box. I personally have only added the “Update Services” Codex list to the Ping Optimizer (this link is available on your WordPress Dashboard > Settings > Writing, then at the bottom of the page where it says Update Services), the remainder I go to each web site and manually ping by putting my URL in the box.

Keep in mind that the bigger your ping list, the greater the chances of receiving traffic from those sources. Below you will find a list of web sites that I recommend to manually ping your updated blog.

6 – Search Engine & Directory Submissions; SEO Tools & Plug-ins

6 Will be covering search engine submissions, submitting your site to directories, maximizing your exposure with RSS Submissions, HTML site validation and SEO browser tools & plug-ins.

Below are the links from this lesson in order of appearance (each link will open a new window or tab to allow you to easily return to this page for more link navigation.)

Here are the Links to My Articles:

10 Indispensable Content Writing Tips article http://seoblogoptimizer.com/seo-content-writing-tips/
Keyword Density http://seoblogoptimizer.com/keyword-density/
Duplicate Content http://seoblogoptimizer.com/avoiding-duplicate-content/
Canonical Issues http://seoblogoptimizer.com/url-canonicalization-wordpress/

301 Redirect Article & WordPress Plug-ins

Here is the 301 Redirect Plug-in for WordPress that I would recommend:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-301-redirects/

Here is the 301 Redirect article that I wrote: http://seoblogoptimizer.com/301-redirect/.
WordPress plug-in SEO Slugs: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-slugs/!

Ping Plug-in & Ping Web Sites

The MaxBlogPress plug-in: http://www.maxblogpress.com/plugins/mpo/

Here is the list of web sites to manually ping your updated blog:

http://blogbuzzer.com/
http://www.pingler.com/
http://pingomatic.com/
http://www.pingoat.com/
http://feedshark.brainbliss.com/