SEO Content Writing

Discover the Findability University SEO Content Writing Tips:

• Writing and decoding good content for your website requires that each page have the keywords added in the proper way.
• Blog post writing must work for both people and robots so that it’s easy to read and easy to find.
• Overused, forced, or poorly-constructed sentences (a.k.a keyword stuffing) sound “spammy” which lowers the perceived quality of the writing.

No matter what business you’re in, or which types of content interest your prospects, optimizing your website will probably mean:

• revising current pages to add keywords;
• writing new pages from scratch.

Either way you are facing three basic SEO writing challenges:

• Marketing Copy: You need high quality SEO content writing that grabs your visitors’ attention and most business owners are not experienced marketing copywriters. When in need, always ask for help. It’s better to outsource your projects than to provide bad user experience.
• The Exhausting Technical Use of SEO: Website copy requires specific usability elements that search engines look for like links, tags, headlines, and other technical aspects that can be a bit intimidating for fresh SEO writers.
• Getting Outside Your Comfort Zone: People grapple with perspective and objectivity when writing content, especially about themselves.

The SEO industry emerged to develop web content that search engine robots recognize as relevant so the pages are ranked higher in search results.
Optimizing for SEO means using your keyword phrases properly to capture search engine attention and show up in search results. This is a holistic practice that takes into account your website content, blogging, links, and social media.

If you searched for the most important SEO ranking factors on Google you’d get options such as, page speed and accessible URL, but Findability University’s secret sauce begins with Findable Content:

• For pages currently on your site: You’ll need to go through each one to add in appropriate keyword phrases based on your Keyword Site Map.
• For your future SEO content writing: You probably have new pages from your Keyword Site Map that you need to write from scratch as well. Make sure you create high-quality content that draws attention and offers solutions.
• What’s your next SEO project? Learning how to incorporate your keywords and start writing high quality copy that speaks to visitors and is recognized as relevant by the search robot.

“T” Stands for Title

The page title or title tag is what is displayed in the search results and provides a preview and brief description of what the page is about.

Your page title is like the title of a term paper or journal article.

Think back to the idea of professorship. Google wants to see that you know what you’re talking about.

The page title needs to make sense, both to the people doing the searching and to the robots delivering the results. Whatever title you choose, it actually shows up in three places:

• search results,
• the tab at the top of the open web window, and
• as the link in social media posts.

Using your keyword phrase in your page title is one of the five components that get you found.

The Perfect Length of Your Page Title? The rule of thumb is to keep your title between 50-60 characters with a sweet spot of 55 so that it isn’t cut short.

If you limit your titles to fewer than 55 characters, you can expect at least 95% of your titles to display properly. This target number includes letters, numbers, punctuation, and the spaces in between them.

“H” Stands for Headline

Your headline ( h1 or h2 tag from html code ) is the first large-sized text on the page and gives the reader an overview of the page.

Web page headlines are often provocative to raise curiosity and grab the reader’s’ attention in the same way newspaper headlines work.

The ideal headline length? Fewer than 70 characters and 65 is a safe bet.

For Findability, good headlines place the keywords up front since that helps with searches.

To make this easier, put your keywords first, followed by a colon and then write the headline you want. You can also use a dash or the pipe (a vertical line found on the same key as the backslash)

e.g. Keyword Phrase – The Headline You Really Wanted.

This is referred to as a “Mullet Headline” after the popular rock star 80s hairstyle, because it features business in the front and party in the back.

Mullet headlines feature an attention-grabbing twist while making the keyword phrase your first priority. Here are a few examples that work for my site:

• Marketing Speaker: Delivering Equal Parts Fun and Profit
• Pinterest Speaker | Pin it to Win it!
• Instagram Speaker – What Every Business Owner Needs to Know about Image Marketing

“B” Stands for Body Copy – The Content Portion of the Page

This is the meat and potatoes of what you want to share with visitors. Body Copy is where you prove to both robots and visitors that your content matches the headline and the title.

This is where you demonstrate your expertise and authority on a particular topic and share valuable information so people want to know even more.

If you don’t want to spend a lot of time working your keywords into your content, use it in the first sentence of the first paragraph.

Starting off your SEO content writing with that keyword phrase indicates that it really is relevant. If the search robot stops on your page to grab it, a “snippet” consisting of the title tag and the first two sentences of the body copy will be displayed in search results.

Another good idea is to get your phone number and a call to action into the first two sentences. That way, when the search engine shows the snippet in search results, people see your phone number and prompt for taking action right away. This also applies to the title tag and blog posts.

“L” Stands for Links

Links are the Internet equivalent of footnotes in a term paper.

Just because you write something doesn’t make you an expert. The only way Google knows that you’ve done your research is by linking to other resources.

Experts know experts, so of course you would link to them to substantiate relevancy of your page.

A lot of business owners object to this piece of the SEO strategy, saying they don’t want links that take visitors away to other websites.

Let me dispel this myth right now!

Remember, your goal is to create the best possible user experience. Visitors will leave your website anyway, but if they’re impressed by it, they will come back.

A well-optimized page, just like a professional journalist, always cites sources.

Links should be on every web page of your site if you want them to rank. No matter what topic and keyword phrase is the focus of the page, internal or external links increase your authority.

Anchor Text Keywords

When you create a link, you highlight a few words to make them clickable that brings you to another page. These words are called “anchor text,” and how you choose them is important.

While it makes sense to use the same keyword phrase for your page as your anchor text, you don’t want to use the exact same phrase. Make it longer or a little different because that is what Google prefers.

“I” Stands for Images

Even your images offer an opportunity to leverage keyword phrases.

From a professorship standpoint, using keywords in your image title and alternate text areas will give you an A+ on your “term paper” according to Google.

When you go to post a photo, the original title will appear. Change this by renaming the file as you post it, using the keyword you’ve assigned to that page.

You can put the same keyword into the box that is called “alt text.”

Alternate text shows up when your mouse rolls over that image on a website. Typically, you’ll see a little yellow pop-up box, which displays the alternate text.

Labeling your images with keywords connects them with all the other parts of the page or blog post.

Every item from the THBLI list reinforces your keyword and helps you ensure not only high-quality SEO content writing, but a complete SEO strategy!