How to Write SEO Content - A Guide from How2Media

A lot of copywriters, webmasters and web agencies have all faced the challenge of how to write SEO contentmany times. As the search engines, in particular Google, have changed their boundaries massively over the years, it has become even more of a challenge to create SEO content.

Google’s own Panda updates have made it paramount for every website to create unique, regular and relevant content that ticks the boxes with search engines and site users alike. Do you remember the days not so long ago when websites stuffed full of unreadable content and countless external links coming in dominated the organic rankings; these days are over.

Website owners and webmasters alike should embrace this new wave of attention to detail by Google, after all it has been put in place to prevent poor quality websites from retaining and gaining high search engine positions. Understanding how to write SEO content in order to get a nice balance between visitor experience and a thumbs up from the search engines is the key.

You also want people to link back to your content and drive traffic to your website as a result, consider why people would find your content engaging. The very best websites become a resource of their industry, not just a service provider or a sales entity, imagine having the benefit of people wanting to visit your site to increase their knowledge and also use your services; this really will make you a market leader in your industry.

Think about sites such as Wikipedia, you can type in almost any search term or phrase and they appear either at the top of Google or near the top. Their whole ethic is based upon relevant content that people will find informative and useful. As well as the subject sites like Wikipedia have made sure that the reader does not just look at one page of the site, carefully placed internal links have been added within the subject content and act as navigation links to other areas of the website.

Taking a moment to summarise, we have established that being relevant, informative, engaging with your intended audience and good navigation are all key factors in writing good SEO content; there are however other important factors.

If this article was thousands of words long how long would we keep your attention? Not very long in the majority of cases. Keeping articles, blog posts and content to a level of words that retains the interest of site visitors will leave them begging for the next installment.

Content that lacks depth will not engage the reader or search engines as there will not be enough instances of keywords, explanations or information to leave a feeling of satisfaction. Try to aim for between 450 and 750 words on average, article publishing websites will almost certainly want this amount of content if they are to re-publish your work and link back to it.

Adding the SEO Factor

Okay so your site visitor is happy with your content and we are presuming that they have linked and shared it. We now need to ensure that it ticks the SEO boxes.

Adding in a meta title that is relevant to the subject of your SEO content is paramount, coupled with relevant header titles such as H1 and H2 titles separating your text will really give the search engines an idea of the subject and keyword focus.

Highlighting the target keywords in a bold font is a good way to grab both user and search engine attention, although do not go to town with this; would you really consider good SEO content or any content readable if it was all in bold? We didn’t think so.

Images are also a great way to grab attention, make sure they are labelled with the right ALT attribute and the search engines will also notice them, we all love an article or content with a bit of life added to it.

As discussed internal links on keywords will also assist your SEO content effort of other pages, keep them relevant to the article and also ensure that navigation factor is considered to keep the visitor reading.

In summary, taking all these factors into account will ensure you stand a great chance of getting a nod of approval from both the search engines and site visitors, hopefully the issue of how to write SEO contentwill become a task that you enjoy and embrace as a new challenge each time it is required