The Art of SEO Writing

You’ve launched your Web site and are ready to take on customers and clients for your business. If you possess some search engine optimization savvy, you likely have already a plan for promotion that involves using social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, and you have a blog attached to your site to help draw in traffic through regular, relevant content. How well your site appears in search on specific keywords will depend on a number of factors – including the popularity of search terms used, and the quality of the content you provide. If you feel confident enough to provide your own writing to boost rankings, it will be helpful to know that SEO writing, while similar to other styles of marketing, does have its differences.

Writing for the Web

It is argued that for Web sites to appear on the first page of search results, the HTML code must be clean, the content relevant, and the keywords plentiful. Unlike traditional journalism – which covers the who, what, where, when and why of an event in a concise, easy to read manner – the purpose of SEO writing is to combine strong writing elements with the right balance of words and phrases to catch the attention of search engines without appearing forced. As search engine spiders become more sophisticated in their mining for online data, they do better to weed out Web sites with an abundance of keywords stuffed arbitrarily in text. This practice, similar to spamming, can penalize a site when it comes time to index.

Let’s say your Web site is set up to sell baseball collectibles, and your best-selling items are baseball cards. You want to promote these items in your writing, so you blog a series of short articles on buying baseball cards. As you browse article databases for examples of SEO writing, you may notice that articles tend to run about 300-400 words and tend to stick to one subject. As you write your piece on baseball cards, however, it’s important not to repeat the term too often in your work. One rule of thumb in SEO writing is to limit your key phrases to a single occurrence every hundred words or so, and using a variety of related words to pick up on secondary searches.

So if you want to write an article extolling the benefits of collecting baseball cards, you’ll want to consider these and other phrases that may be used in search for your products: baseball cards, trading cars, sports memorabilia, baseball collectibles, rare baseball items.

If your site is set up for a different purpose, make a list of the ten most probable phrases used in search to find a site like yours, then work to use them in an informative on-site article or blog post for advertising your services. Link relevant terms to pages within your site to create a strong association to your site with the terms. The more you write and add to your site, the more search engines will note your authority on the subject at hand.

If you are unable to keep up with the volume needed to maintain high visibility on the Web, consider hiring the service of a professional SEO writer service to enhance the relevancy of your site. You’ll find the work will pay off as you gain the trust of new customers.