it’s sometimes difficult to see where you’re going, there are some tools you can use to help get where you’re heading. Great SEO is essential to great content writing services. Here at Express Writers, we understand the value of keeping our fingers on the pulse of the moving target of good SEO: it’s the difference between navigating the river of content writing with a makeshift raft and an oar, and piloting down-river in a steamboat.
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a process by which web content is carefully crafted to respond positively to specific Google search results. In order to foster great SEO value for your web content, you merely need to predict how someone on the web may find you. For instance, if you’re an auto mechanic who specializes in imports, you could engage a content writing service to produce web content around the keywords “Toyota check engine light, ” or “Mitsubishi will not start, ” since those are likely very close to what some of your potential customers are searching for. Let’s take a detour for a moment in the jungle of web content to discuss how SEO can make or break good content writing services, and look at 10 tips any content writer can’t do without.
1. Write a Great Headline. We feel like a broken record every time we write this sentence, but the value of a good headline just can’t be overstated. Keep your headlines brief; less than 120 characters makes for a good fit for social media shares. Remember that search engines only index the first 65 characters, so craft your headlines accordingly: important keywords near the beginning. Finally, use some of the proven methods of effective headline writing to ensure some visits:
– Include numerals, such as statistics, or a list post: “7 Hot Hairstyles to Reinvent Your Look” or “The Wealth-Building Secret that 80% of Wall Street Doesn’t Want You to Know. ”
– Include exclusivity words such as “secret. ”
– Offer the quick fix: “6 Ways to Banish Age Spots Instantly. ”
– Imply an existing consensus: “Who Else Wants to Lose 10 Pounds This Week? ”
2. Key phrases, not key words. Writing for keywords is a standard practice of content writing services, but not many people know the secret of writing for keyword density: focus on key phrases rather than just keywords. To use the example of a hair salon, one could produce content simply for keywords like “highlights” and “salon, ” but you’ll probably fare better if you write around key phrases like “Which salon does the best hair highlights? ” Content writing done this way taps directly into the mind of the consumer doing a web search, and ensures that if someone does want to know which salon does the best highlights, the answer is you.
3. Geo-Target. If most of your business comes from your immediate area, it’s usually a good practice to include geo-targeted keywords in the key phrases you write content around. For example: “podiatrist” may snag some web searches which are irrelevant to your business, but “podiastrist in provo” will naturally attract more local traffic.
4. Content matters! Content writing services aren’t just about filling your blog with words that are going to act like magnets to web traffic. While it would be simple to fill pages with keyword-rich copy, readers who arrive to find a page that isn’t relevant to what they were searching for are not going to stay. When you engage in content writing, make sure that you’re writing content that is relevant to what you do, informative to your readers, and makes them want to stick around to learn more about you and what you do.
5. Ideal post length. There’s no easy answer to the ideal length of a post when you’re doing content writing, but it’s worth noting that most of the results ranking on the first page of Google for any given keyword are around 2, 000 words on average. With a section on your website devoted to content writing service such as a blog, this is easy to fill. In general, never write fewer than 400 words for any single blog post, and never more than 1000. These benchmarks make for posts that are long enough to be informative and contain an appropriate keyword density without being overkill.
6. Don’t keyword stack. If you know that you’re writing for a specific list of keywords such as “donuts, bagels, pastries, and pies, ” don’t stack those keywords in a list like this every time you use them. They will be more effective spread out naturally among your writing, and less awkward for your readers, too.
7. Use original content! It should go without saying that your content writing should be original and unique to your website. Plagiarism is stealing, and it’s something that we web content writers take very seriously. Moreover, it’s worthwhile that you avoid using duplicate content on your own website. In other words, don’t re-post an article from your blog to another page on your website. Search engines that see duplicate content on two separate pages of a site see that as an attempt at keyword spam, and will bury your pages deep in the search results.
We hope that this post has brought you a better understanding of content writing for SEO, and that it will help you moving forward whether you’re creating your own content or choosing a content writing service. Here at Express Writers, we always create our content to be rich, compelling, and informative as well as ensuring that it will outperform the average post in search results that are relevant to you and what you do. Writing with one eye on the moving target of SEO is a unique and engaging challenge that keeps the job of the web content writer interesting day after day.