SEO Content Writing

Author: Gregory Bassett

SEO ‘copywriting’ is one of those things thats easy to learn but hard to master. I’m gonna try to outline the basics here and hopefully help a few people along the way.

The first thing you need to be sure of when writing SEO content is that its of a high quality. Well written, well structured and well researched content
will always rank higher than a page of gibberish, unless there are some exceptional circumstances. Make sure your content is spell checked and (if possible) proof read by a friend, relative or colleague. Its a simple step but one that is almost always missed. I do this frequently, so Apples built in spell checker is almost essential for me these days.

Content is useless if the information provided is not true. Research the subject, think about it and then write. If the information your providing isn’t accurate then your likely to miss out on valuable traffic from search results (e.g Writing about AMD mac’s rather than Intel based ones - very few people are searching for such machines). This may seem obvious to some but you should also bare in mind that your users will directly relate the quality of your site with the quality of your content.

Keywords are essential to writing good SEO content and its vital that you have them chosen prior to writing. This will, for obvious reasons, vary from site to site. Lets say for example that your writing an article about smoking and more to the point how to stop. The prime keywords for this would be ‘quit smoking’. The competition for these will be high, so you may want to think about other ways a user may word the phrase when searching - in this case perhaps ’stop smoking’. You should always try to ensure that you dont use more than 2 words when choosing your keywords.

Well written SEO Content requires you to use the keywords effectively and frequently. You should also consider paying alittle attention to their placement. While its great to squeeze your chosen word or phrase in as many times as possible its also important to keep the text coherent. Simply writing “stop smoking, stop smoking, stop smoking, stop smoking” over and over wont get the job done. Google and its competitors are extremely smart and will simply mark the page as ’spam’. You may also find that using your keywords at the start and end of a paragraph improves results but to some this is abit of a gray area.

Finally, you need to make sure your text is somewhere between 200 and 1000 words in length. Its important to do this so the search engines know that your writing enough to provide its users with what they’re looking for but not so much that they wont be able to find it amongst a wall of text.

Good luck!

About the Author:
Gregory Bassett is a young webmaster from central England with 9 years experience in website management, maintenance, marketing and development.