SEO Do’s and Dont’s For Content Writers
On : August 14th, 2014By :
Anyone even remotely part of a small business to a growing enterprise; has definitely heard of the three mind boggling letters spelled together: SEO! Its a business term but its a content writer’s biggest foe-friend too. Even Calculus didn’t freak out people as much as the thought of SEO does now. And just for any entrepreneur who doesn’t know of this creepy term; Search Engine Optimization a.k.a SEO refers to the process of directing search engine traffic to your website. So if you’re a content writer, master it well enough and its Christmas for your enterprise!
But just when content writers think of it as a trick to be picked, let me tell you something. Its not a direct highway. SEO is a road trip with lessons and tips all along just to help you learn. So welcome entrepreneur, to the messy world of SEO perfection! Lets get started!
The Do’s
1. Is The Content Writer Content With the Content?
The one thing that everyone is chanting in the SEO universe: Content Quality! Every crawler and every algorithm is working passionately to find the best quality content for its users. Search engines are focussed on finding quality content that give people the information rich material to keep them hooked. Grammatical errors are a no-no obviously; or you can forget listing in the SERPs altogether. Give people knowledge that grips them and solves all their problems! Basically write for the reading; not just for the sake of it. The readers are the ones that matter; might as well give them an awesome experience.
2.Effective Headlines
When a web crawler looks for what its user is looking for; the first and most important search is in the heading. After all, that’s the most simplified and refined compilation of what you are writing about! Plus your headline is the first line to imprint on any head that reads your work. Ever heard of first impression is the last impression? If you can capture them with the heading, then you have captured their attention. Or else, you are scrolled over!
3. Use Available SEO Tools
You know about all the assessment tools; Analytics and Ad-Words and the likes. But ever wondered how to find the way to optimize your work, content writers, on making your work seen by search engines? Some of the free and amazingly helpful tools are Wordstream and Google Authorship. Wordstream is purely a keyword research tool. You wanna know whats trending in the keyword arena; find it here! Google Authorship is one really cool deal to look up! With this, you get a free linking with Google! Not exactly that but it creates an automatic author biography page link to every piece of content you post. So its like you get advertised by Google in a short liner every time you are seen in the SERPs. Pretty cool, huh?
The Dont’s
1. No Keyword Stuffing
This is your article. It is not a cream pie or a pizza base that is in need to be stuffed and loaded. Quit being naïve and loading content with too many keywords. Even Google is smart enough to not fall for your keywords like that. Its recent major algorithm updates; Panda 4.0, Penguin, can easily identify synonyms, not just in words but in phrases too. Basically, these smarter algorithms don’t really get fooled by too many keywords in your text. They just work perfectly with toppings of keywords not entire stuffing, please.
2. Don’t Ignore Social Media
In 2014, social media is the boss. Yes. As your Facebook, Instagram and twitter followers increase, so does your position in Google search results too! Yes, I am not making this up. Various studies have substantially proven that social media activity boosts SERPs like nothing before! After all, you target people and the people are all online! But just being there won’t get you the results! You have to be active as well as relevant. So yes, engage in commenting, sharing, everything. More about this; check out the previous blog post! Work on making your cyber-image seen!
3. Don’t ‘Keep it short and simple’
Many content writers believe that keeping it brief is the best way to get readers. That people will be bored with too much technical jargon, so keep it understandable for the common man. But guess what? That is just not the truth anymore! The insatiable hunger for knowledge is leading to trending longer articles; with more tech-cabulary than you could imagine. The ideal word count is around 1000 words according to research on Google’s blog selectiveness.
So you might realize that SEO is not so technical as it sounds. In fact a decent article with a mind blowing research and interactive linguistic skills; and voila you are the master of SEO, Content Writer! So go get them!
