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Writing In The Age of SEO
Dec 01, 2018
SEO Friendly Content = More Traffic
If you enjoy the craft of writing or have a few scribes in your network, you'll appreciate that good writing is a balance of art and science. In other words, the key to producing quality content is to adapt your personal voice (the art) to fit within the prose guidelines of your chosen language (the science). Unlike traditional print, the rules of search engine optimization or SEO have introduced a new kind of "science" to writing in the digital age.
I know that it's hard enough to turn your personal views into a coherently-written blog post. Furthermore, it's even tougher to think about sentence structure or how often you're using a target keyword when organizing your thoughts.
Given the importance of SEO in driving traffic to your online content, how do you go about making sure that people can actually find your posts via search?
Fortunately, there is a solution to this seemingly-impossible formula. I'm going to show you what proper SEO formatting looks like in practice. Simply put, it's a step-by-step guide for building the perfect blog or webpage to be as easy-to-find for your favorite search engine as possible.
Focus Keyword / Key Phrase
The first ingredient for SEO is a single keyword or key phrase
that you will feature throughout a specific page. Most importantly, it's a word or phrase that will appear several times in your blog or page copy. In addition, this word or phrase needs to be present in the page title and page sub-headline. For example, the focus keyword for this specific post is "SEO."
Headline / Sub-headline
Once you identify your target keyword or key phrase, you need to plug it into your page headline and sub-headline. For example, this blog post's title is "Writing In The Age of SEO" - and the sub-headline is "SEO Friendly Content = More Traffic." As you can see, the keyword appears in both headlines.
Keyword Density
To ensure that your page is easily searchable, your focus keyword needs to appear more than once within your blog post or webpage. Typically, you'll want the keyword or key phrase to account for one to five percent of the total words used in a given blog or webpage. Depending on the platform you are using, there will be a guide within your content template
that shows your keyword density percentage. Generally, it's best to include your keyword at least once every five to six sentences.
In summary, it's never fun to think about remembering to do something specific when writing. This is especially true when you're writing a personal blog and want it to be a true reflection of your opinion. However, as I've learned through experience, it doesn't take long to adapt your personal style to SEO guidelines. Simply put, you just need to think about your keyword - and it won't be long until you start making lemonade with every search engine.
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