Five Tips for Writing Search-Engine-Friendly Content

Weidert Group Staff
Posted by Weidert Group Staff on August 16, 2010

You have a great website. It has beautiful images, a compelling theme and intuitive navigation, all designed to take eager visitors to complete descriptions of your proprietary products and services. The only problem is your website shows up somewhere after page 10 on search engine results. Since most referrals to sites come directly from search engines, search-engine-friendly content is imperative.

Here are five tips to make sure search engines love you and your prospects can find you.






1. Clearly identify your SEO goals. SEO isn’t about ranking first on every area and page on your website. Rather, the goal should be to incorporate search-engine-friendly content that performs well on the most important “money phrases.” These are areas that you’ve identified that typically lead to additional action by visitors and prospects (or, make you the most money!).

2. Choose Important Keywords. Using your “money phrases,” identify and analyze a list of possible keywords that users may search to find your information. The word “keyword” is a bit misleading because this list should not be individual words. Try to develop very specific phrases that relate to your topics. For example, if you sell doors, your keyword shouldn’t be “doors,” that’s too vague. A better keyword phrase would be “aluminum exterior house doors” or “solid core wood doors.” search-engine-friendly content will flow simply from expanding on each of these phrases.

3. Organize your content. After you’ve identified the appropriate keywords you want to use throughout your site, group similar keyword topics into silos. Using the doors example above, silos may be interior doors, exterior doors and garage doors with the specific types of each category being grouped together. This also simplifies your website’s architecture if it isn’t already in place.

4. Write for the audience, not the search engines. The actual content writing itself becomes an art of balancing the technical needs to make the search engine spiders happy and the clear, concise, benefit-focused information needs of your audience. When in doubt, err on the side of your audience. Search engines may love you but if your content isn’t attractive to your visitors and they choose to leave your site, all your work is for nothing. Write page copy with enough specific keyword density to be search-engine-friendly but not so dense that it becomes meaningless. After your first draft of copy for each section is written, use one of the many density tools available to evaluate each of your pages. A good rule is 3-5% saturation on each page.

5. Expand the reach of your keywords. After you’re satisfied with your content and your keywords are loaded into title tags, meta descriptions, H1 tags, etc. Focus on driving inbound links from reputable sources. For example, make sure your search-engine-friendly content is included in all of your PR activity and encourage media outlets to link to you. Strive for inbound links direct from industry resources or organizations. The more links to your site, the more important you’ll look to search engine spiders.

Keep in mind that your results won’t be instant, they’ll improve over time. Search-engine-friendly content is just the start, watch for additional tricks and tips to SEO improvement in our future blog entries.

Topics: Search Engine Optimization, Content Marketing

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