SEO Content – Writing to Grow Your Company
Many would agree that content is one of the most important components of SEO and professional web design and some might even say that content is one of the best ways to monetize from Exciting as it may seem, doing SEO can become rather mundane if you are in an industry that is not extremely volatile or innovative. The thing most people don’t understand about SEO is the fact that it is driven by content. Because of this and the saturation you deal with when marketing online you end up having to produce a lot of content on a regular basis (especially if you are in a competitive industry like marketing) much like the blog post I am creating this very moment.
Search engines like Google can find your content very quickly and analyze the social response it has along with many other metrics such as the average time on site spent on your pages when visitors land on your content. So when you write an article that gets published on a very popular website and it gets hundreds of shares and likes from all the social media channels, that web page gets a lot of positive recognition from Google. The reason is because search engines like Google use content as a source of information to identify relevancy for a given search query. The quality and relevance of the content has a direct correlation to page rank. Google is nothing but a computer program that is engineered to fetch relevant results to any given search query. They do this by building an algorithm based search engine to scan the millions of pages out there on the world-wide-web within seconds and to find the best answer(s) for you. Depending on how many other website results for a given keyword, it can become extremely difficult to earn the coveted top 3 positions in the organic results (results that don’t say “Ad” next to them). Today I am going to cover how to write content that is SEO friendly because not everyone likes to out source to an SEO content writing company. I will touch on the SEO basics that tie in with writing SEO content and explain how our SEO content writing services differ from that of many other firms out there.
Creating Engaging Content For SEO and U/X.
So now that we all know why content is important to search engines like Google, let’s talk about how you can create really high quality content that you can monetize from. In this blog post I would like to explain how to write excellent web copy and blog posts that can be used to monetize from your existing website traffic by providing a good user experience (U/X) and by encouraging the search engines to place you on the top of the results.
So, let’s start with the basics of content writing by going back to a time when we were all in grade school learning how to write our first essay for English class. We all had to do it, come up with an essay that is formatted correctly and that has a intelligent layout that contains an introduction, body and conclusion. Well, the same rules apply in SEO. A good article or blog post needs to have an intelligent structure by including an informative yet summarized introduction, a very detailed and easy to comprehend body and a conclusion that makes readers feel like they should subscribe to your blog because it was truly a great read. Of course, on top of this we must now incorporate keywords, links and SEO factors like meta descriptions, unique page titles, alt tags for your images more. If you’re thinking at this point, that this is harder than you thought it would be… Don’t worry, everyone who gets into SEO feels this way at some point or another.
Accurate and Descriptive Title Tags
Weather it’s a blog post or a new product page that you’re adding to a website, title tags are used by Google to identify what your page is about with a short title that should be around 60-70 characters in length. This is a great place to use keywords but you should also be careful not to abuse title tags by simply stuffing them with keywords. Google references a few examples of what a clean title should look like and they break it down into 3 easy to understand snap shots with short descriptions which I’ve added below.
If you follow Google’s recommendation, they will reward you for providing their customers (search engine users) with a good user experience. An accurate title tag is the first thing a search engine user will see so it’s important that you use USP’s and keywords to keep a balance between tending to the needs of the user and search engine.
Making Use of The Meta Description Tag
Second to the Title tag, Google uses the Meta description of a web page to show their customers briefly describe the pages content. Google mentions that you should should create unique summaries of your page content with your meta description and Matt Cutts even mentioned that each page is an opportunity to rank for keyword so having unique titles and descriptions are always recommended if you want to get more from your organic traffic.
Google doesn’t always show the meta description in the search results. Sometimes, depending on what keyword you use, you might find that Google uses content from your body or “structured data” and uses that instead of your meta description. This is due to the fact that Google uses an intelligent crawling program that can scan a web page and show the most accurate description based on the pages content. Sometimes, the content found in the body of a page is more relevant to the users search query than the meta description itself as shown in the screen shots below where I used [using Google Analytics to track ROI] as my search query. In the screen shot you can see the search engine result’s description and the meta description are not the same :
Again, this is another great place to include keywords but you must always follow the general rule of thumb which is a balance between pleasing the search engines and the user. Don’t just stuff keywords in your meta description as that will do you more harm than good.
Something that we have noticed which is important to take into consideration to be weary of including phone numbers in your title or description. We have seen a few cases where simply removing the phone number from a title and/or description has increase the rank for a specific page and keyword.
Optimizing Your Body Content
When it comes to writing the body content of your web page, consider the fact that good content can mean the difference between showing up on page one of Google or not. If you use crappy, keyword-stuffed content that is sloppy you are actually doing yourself more harm than good and here is why; when you create spammy content that is clearly just a feeble attempt at trying to manipulate search engines which are intelligent enough to identify these types of techniques. On top of that, you are now providing your website visitors with a poor user experience, let’s face it no one wants to read a bunch of spammy content.
So aside from making sure that you write engaging content that grabs your readers attention and showcases the fact that you are the best company to do business with you’re also going to need to strategically include factors that the search engines will evaluate so that you show up on Google. Some of the most important factors that need to be optimized are the links, media and keywords in your text.
Using Links in Your Content
When you read a good article on the web, or a blog from a well known blogger on a well known website you almost always see links when the writer is referencing a source of information or media. Links are measured by Google as a ranking factor because sites that get links from well known sites are usually very reputable and probably a good result to have on the Google results page. Now more than ever, bloggers are looking for ways to get accepted as a guest blogger to produce content with links back to their websites and social signals from the big audience that they’re writing for website has. Because Google measures links, it’s important that you utilize them in the right way, don’t just use links without a valid reason to do so. If you are generating your own content, make sure to include links by using the best practices for SEO or make sure to hire a website copy writing company that knows that they are doing. Generally, links can be used to direct visitors to difference pages within your website or on other website that need to be referenced. Using keywords as the clickable text within your link is something that you should not become accustomed to doing as it is a technique that has been abused and identified by Google as spam.
Optimizing Your Header Tags
When you begin to write the content on your page or post, you should consider the fact that Google gives credit to the keywords used in paragraph headings more-so than keywords found in the content within the paragraphs. So if you want you’re product page or service page to show up for keywords like “your service in your location” (i.e. web design in miami) you will want to try and use that keyword at some point through our your content and in the paragraph headings. Paragraph headings can be used to separate your intro, body and conclusion paragraphs just like how most of you reading this did in high school growing up for your English class.
If you are writing long posts that require sub categories, then you should use your h1’s, h2’s and h3’s accordingly. For example, since I am talking about the different parts of optimizing body content, I have used an h2 as the heading that explains we are going to start talking about body content and h3’s for each sub category within the body content section of this post i.e. links, headers and image alt tags.
Optimizing Your Image Alt Tags
Images are a great way to provide your visitors with some visual stimulation so that they don’t get bored with a ton of content. It’s something that you will see on all modern websites as it has become the norm (probably because most people have short attention spans and hate reading) so it would behoove you to do the same and here is why. When you use images in your content, you are creating an opportunity to optimize your website for search engines. By adding an “alt tag” to your images which allow the search engines to get a text description of the image you insert into your site.
Why is that important? Well Google unlike yourself can’t see with a set of eyeballs. Instead, Google uses alt tags! So when they find an image without an alt tag on your competitors website and then they see your website that is just as good but it has alt tags, guess who has the advantage? Of course, this is a very basic example and it is assuming that all other SEO factors are the same between the two sites.
Finding The Best Content Writing Company
There are many SEO content writing companies out there that can provide you with SEO content writing services if you need a ton of pages made in bulk. The problem is 9 out of 10 SEO companies or PPC management Companies are straight up scams! This is why I wanted to conclude this post by refferring your to a page on Google Support, that explains which types of questions you should be asking before hiring a marketing company to provide you with SEO content writing. I encourage everyone to read their support page titled “Do you need an SEO company” so that you can make an educated decision before hiring your SEO firm. And by the way, ironically, the top of that page mentions how content writing services happen to be one of the popular services offered by SEO’s.
With the growing demand for content The Miami SEO Company has established a network of college students and virtually anyone who can quality to write content for our clients. We have developed an online system which allows them to provide you with content in bulk. More importantly, our content is SEO friendly and is highly engaging so that your visitors stay on your site longer and complete the goals you are tracking for your marketing campaign! They way it should be!
About The Author
Jason Hawkins / http://www.themiamiseocompany.com
Jason Hawkins is the CEO & Co-Founder of The Miami SEO Company. He has over ten years of experience in search engine optimization, conversion rate optimization and lead generation. His core responsibilities include identifying ways to increase value of services rendered, training staff on advanced SEO topics, and A/B testing internal processes to consistently improve client return on investment.
