Whether you own a blog of your own, or are writing content for someone else, you need to be focusing on SEO.
If you don’t, you’re missing out on a boatload of free, heavily targeted traffic that can positively impact your business for years to come.
Writing high quality, SEO focused articles is something almost anybody can do, even if you’re not a professional writer. The key is understanding what to focus on and what to ignore.
Below are the 4 key tips for SEO writing like a pro.
1. Always Do Your Keyword Research
Most people know keyword research is critical, but many don’t know how to do it.
The trick is to find commonly searched, low competition keywords that you can easily outrank the competition on. It’s usually best to pick at least 3-5 major keywords to focus your site’s content around.
You should make sure that content you write for your website is able to utilize these keywords fairly often. It’s not enough to select and target keywords, you actually have to use them…
2. Strategically Use Your Chosen Keywords
Once you have your keywords chosen, put them into a Google spreadsheet to keep track of them. Use an SEO checker to also keep tabs of where you rank for them.
Now when you write an article, you need to make sure you choose a primary keyword and work it into the article in a variety of ways.
It’s not enough to just use the keyword a bunch of times throughout the body, you need to strategically place it elsewhere.
In the article title, make sure the primary keyword is included, preferably at the front.
Do the same thing with headers throughout the article.
Lastly, don’t forget to include keywords into alternate descriptions of your images.
Search engines like Google will eventually start to pick up your site as an authority around those keywords. At this point, prepare yourself for a bunch more traffic.
3. Write Interesting and Useful Content
This third tip is less about SEO and more about content in general.
You could write the most perfect article for SEO purposes with all sorts of keywords, but it doesn’t do any good if the content is utter crap.
Search engines are getting better at differentiating between bad content with tons of backlinks and great content that actually helps people.
The old way of SEO is dead, and the new way involves actually writing useful, interesting content.
4. The Longer the Better
One way the search engines are weeding out poor articles is by changing their algorithms to make word count matter.
Obviously, some content is better than no content, and at worst you at least have something people can look at. However, when it comes to SEO, the longer the better.
The minimum word count your articles should have is 300 words. If you can get to 500 that’s even better.
More research is coming out showing that longer articles, typically greater than 1,500 words, are heavily favored in new search engine rankings.
Conclusion
SEO can sometimes be confusing, and it’s certainly always changing, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Follow the tips above and you’ll be writing content just as good, if not better, than a professional SEO writer.
