What you need to know when writing SEO driven content
Search Engine Optimized (SEO) content is at the core of any valid growth-driven SEO, and to an extent, the digital marketing strategy.
Content gives value to the site. It is the reason users visit and spend time on the website. The content itself though, similarly as websites, is wildly different throughout the internet.
Certain websites are focused only on image-based content, some on video but a majority of websites have the written text as a part of their content and presentation.
Here let’s focus on general business, product, blog, text-based websites that are commonly present throughout the internet. But in the core principle writing for SEO applies to any kind of website.
Accordingly, this article explores how to write SEO driven content by focusing on 2 close dimensions but with very different needs that need to be considered.
The article is intended for writers and content makers who are annoyed by their webmasters and SEO specialist insistence on following certain principles while writing; thus limiting their creative freedom. Accordingly this article is a great reminder for webmasters and SEO specialists on the goal of search engines and the importance of user, creative and useful content.
Why writing is so important for SEO?
In essence, because of the bots — the working engines behind search engines. The bot, for now, meaningfully process text within certain markup and technical structure.
Images and videos processing for bots still rely on textual tags and attributes for classification and description.
Besides, it is important to understand that search engines differ. What works in Google might not work on Yahoo or Baidu or Bing. But, since Google is the most advanced it covers the biggest search engine market share — the search engine in the article is synonymous with Google.
Due to the nature and existence of bots, writing SEO driven content is not just like writing any other content — comedy, romance or drama, or whatever.
It is not tough or miraculous, but just different. It’s writing with a specific purpose, but with added twists.
To discover these twists, we’ll need to explore the SEO basics first.
SEO Basics
Per MOZ SEO is a marketing discipline focused on growing visibility in organic (non-paid) search engine results.[1]
SEO encompasses both the technical and creative elements required to improve rankings, drive traffic, and increase awareness in search engines.
There are many aspects to SEO, from the words on your page to the way other sites link to you on the web. Sometimes SEO is simply a matter of making sure your site is structured in a way that search engines understand. [ibid.]
And it is that content structuring and search engine satisfaction what is important for any SEO driven content. SEO content that satisfies all the technical aspects will affect the site’s SEO and improve the site’s organic results. The writing needs to follow the same principles.
Now, throughout time, as search engines evolved so did SEO. (And to be honest, some stuff written here could be invalid, or to an extent, just wrong in a couple of months). These day search engines are great in understanding what makes happy and satisfied users.
And since the search engine’s prime mission is to have satisfied and returning users — search engines look to provide correct and satisfactory information to user’s search queries and input.
The same principle applies to any website. A happy user is indeed a returning user. It is that perspective that makes SEO writing different.
To make it clearer, to write SEO driven content you have to be mindful of 2 dimensions:
First, that the content itself is of high quality and it is providing good and honest information that respond to users’ queries (topics the user is researching)
Second, That the content also satisfies technical aspects that will allow search engine bots digest the content better, faster for easier and more accurate indexing
These dimensions are not exclusive. They complement each other. And any SEO driven content needs to respect them both. It needs to make the users and bots happy.
Making the Users Happy
And make them very happy. SEO driven content needs to be created with users intention and satisfaction in mind.
It’s the users that research and look for the information online. Because of that, the content needs to be unique, of high quality, and provide value to the users. That content will make the user return to the website, engaged and happy.
I am aware that this doesn’t help as advice on how to write good SEO driven content. Quality and uniqueness aren’t that specific of an advice.
But I mention them here since search engines, namely Google here, have invested a lot to make those qualities respected and beneficial for SEO.
Google, in their Search Engine Quality Elevator Guidelines [3] highlight Beneficial Purpose, E-A-T, and YMYL as core website & content qualities for high ranking websites.
In short, Beneficial Purpose means that website and pages, content, should be created to help the user. E-A-T assumes the content needs to show levels of Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. And finally, Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) content is the type of information that, if presented inaccurately, untruthfully, or deceptively, could directly impact the reader’s happiness, health, safety, or financial stability.
Google uses these qualities, and many other, in its ranking algorithm. All of them are not known. Though, there are some glimpses of them through the documents and third party research.
Sometimes Google releases the algorithm updates information that provides clear guidelines and focuses.
For this article, it’s important to introduce The Google Panda and The Google Penguin algorithm update.
The Panda & The Penguin
The uniqueness of the content deserves a special highlight here. This directly relates to Google’s Panda algorithm update which was developed to reduce the prevalence of low-quality, thin content in the search results, and to reward unique, compelling content.
Panda was rolled out to counter the ever-increasing rampage of low-quality content, content farms and spammy sites. Google’s Panda algorithm assigns pages a quality classification modeled after human quality ratings, which is incorporated as a ranking factor. [4]
Google Panda rolled out back in 2010 and now it’s the core of Google’s search algorithm. Although it does sounds technical, the idea behind is straightforward — unique and quality content will make users happy.
And sooner or later as the number of happy users grows, the website that has the content will become a brand on its own. And sooner or later the users will willingly flock to it searching for the information or entertainment they need.
Users who like the content will share it and engage with it outside your website (on social media, forums…). All this engagement is bound to create backlinks. And backlinks are important for any SEO efforts.
In short, backlinks are links from outside domains that point to pages on your domain; linking back from their domain to yours. To a larger degree, your backlink profile forms backlinks from external sites (also known as referring domains) that contribute to the overall strength, relevance and diversity of your domain’s backlink profile.[5]
And the better the backlink profile, the better the SEO for the website.
The importance of backlinks to measure the website authority and strength was the core to the (now deprecated) Page Rank. (Named after Google’s Larry Page).
In the early days of the SEO, the higher your Page Rank is the better your site for SEO.
As you can assume this particular relation was misused a lot. Sooner or later people were buying backlinks on shady websites in bulk. And that’s why in April 2012 Google rolled out its Penguin algorithm update.
Google launched the Penguin Update in April 2012 to catch sites considered to be spamming its search results, in particular, those doing so by buying links or getting them through link networks designed primarily to boost Google rankings.[6]
It is with those 2 updates that Google set out to promote those websites that provide useful and unique content to the users.
To be clear, those are not the only major updates Google introduced to their algorithm.
After the Penguin updates, there were many other major updates (and they are still happening; check details here) and they are smaller ones happening from day today.
But the Penguin and Panda are very important as they laid down the foundation for SEO that is driven by unique, relevant and useful content. Google knows well that users who find good and relevant information using their search engine — they’ll return, over and over.
And that’s Google’s business. They’re in the information business and providing helpful, quality, E-A-T information will benefit from the increased rankings.
Now, truthfully, there are no clear definitions what that content is, what topics should it cover and how it should be developed. Every website or platform should develop its own niche, voice and brand.
And that brand should be translated into the content as well.
The content that puts the users first and makes them happy is valued by everyone.
Except for bots, if you don’t have the technicalities well defined.
Make the Bots happy
The technical side of writing for SEO is not so nuanced and vague. It’s rather precise due to the search engine’s content processing method and underlying technology.
It is easier to complete and implement, but yeah it might not be so intuitive for usual writers.
Let’s back up a bit with the basics. And a couple of analogies.
If I may use a simple analogy — search engines are nothing more than quick librarians. They manage a library of information that has been replicated (scraped) from all the publicly accessible websites and their assets. Assets that make up a website page — text, images, videos, PDFs and so.
Those assets, content, are fetched by bots, so-called search engine spiders through the crawling process.
Their core mission is to roam the wild-lands of the internet and replicate the details of websites.
They then categorize and organize all the replicated information into one giant library.
At Google, that library is named — The Google Search index, and it holds hundreds of billions of webpages and is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes in size. It’s like the index in the back of a book — with an entry for every word seen on every web page we index. When Google indexes a web page, they add it to the entries for all the words it contains.[7]
And, in its essence, the technical SEO is nothing more than efforts to mark up the website content so the search engine bots can understand and categorize it better.
The way bots read is tightly connected with HTML markup and specific in code elements.
These should be satisfied and optimized for faster and better bots’ categorization and processing. We’ll get into some major elements later below.
Writing SEO driven content would require an assumption that the content will be read, not only by humans but also by bots.
And luckily this process is straightforward. And it all begins with keywords.
On Keywords
Keywords are ideas and topics that define what your content is about. In terms of SEO, they’re the words and phrases that searchers input into search engines, also called “search queries.”
If you boil everything on your page — all the images, video, copy, etc. — down to simple words and phrases, those would be your primary keywords. [8]
The main aim of keywords is to connect the user’s search query with the specific content on your website.
Usually, targeted keywords should correlate with the general topic of the website and your earlier content. This necessary to establish a brand, a voice of your website, which search engines can easily categorize it and tag it E-A-T for the topic.
For example, if you have a fashion blog, it’s expected for you to focus (target and optimized) fashion-based keywords rather than, let’s say, engineering or sports keywords.
You may be inclined to think about adding keywords everywhere throughout your web page and content as much as possible. Content creators and webmasters were already there at one point.
This is called ‘keyword stuffing’ and it was a legit SEO tactic a while back.
Not anymore. Today, “keyword stuffing” can create penalties and problems for your website. Which will cause losing SEO rank and authority.
Instead, just write normally but take a keyword as an overarching topic of your piece.
These days, search engines understand written language well. And they know that one keyword — one concept; is explainable or expressible in many ways.
Here it is important to note the concept of LSI keywords. LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords are words that are commonly found together within a single topic and are semantically related to each other. [9]
With LSIs in mind, it is easier to make single keyword content easier. It should just come in naturally.
And it makes sense, you wouldn’t target (write about) sports keywords and compose the content with chocolate or cooking concepts.
Writing your SEO driven content should start with the keyword, a topic.
Further optimization of content elements is derived from it.
Optimization elements
As noted, before, the main point of technical optimization is to make the bots happy.
And the bots are happy when the content of the website is well written, of decent size and precisely marked up.
Marking up content here entails using HTML elements to define what is the content about and how the bot should index it.
Any, written SEO driven content should include keywords, topics, or related explanations in the following elements:
- URL — URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator and it stands for a location where the content is found on the website (on the server). Search Engines love a neatly organized and structured website.
- Title tag — Within HTML markup the title tag is defined within <title> … </title> tag. This tag is the subject or even a ‘name’ of the content on the website. It carries great weight with bots.
- H1 tag — Heading 1 tag is one of the six heading tags used in HTML <h1>, <h2> … <h6>. Heading tags are there to split the content into significant parts. Bots use them to understand the sections of content. The number of heading tags shows the significance, H1 carrying the largest significance.
- Meta description tag — Meta description tag is defined within the HTML tag <meta name=”description” content=”your amazing meta description”>. On many occasions, Google’s officials have noted that meta description has no SEO value. Though, its role is to present a snippet of text on search engine results (so-called SERPs). SEO specialists use the meta description to optimize the appearance of content. This is aimed at increasing the click-through rate (CTR) so more users click on the SERPs and visit the websites.
- Linking and anchors — Linking deserves a whole article on its own. To sum it up though, there are internal and external backlinks. Websites have ‘SEO juice’. As in SEO power and authority level. The level of this juice depends on the authority and quality of the website. This juice is transferred by links and anchor texts. Anchor texts are just text that describes the link. There is a value from internal and external linking. While writing content has in mind that it would be good to link some keywords to other articles on the website. This way the interconnectedness of the website is stronger and that is SEO positive.
- Optimized assets and multimedia — Every piece of the content should be perfected. Beyond text, this also goes for any images, .pdfs, videos used on the page. The easiest and most powerful optimization that could be done in this regard is just to give descriptive, keyword-focused names to all the assets used on the content piece. Images have alt-tags that can be optimized for keywords and relate it better to content. On the other hand, PDFs and videos also have metadata that could be optimized. Metadata in this contest are data about data. They specify the content with textual elements: like a topic, subject, description, tags and even ownership.
For this article, there is no point in going into technicality and details of these elements.
But it is helpful for anyone writing SEO content to understand that there are specific elements, outside the text itself, that need to be optimized.
The optimization of the said elements is usually implemented by SEO specialists or webmasters in cooperation with the content creators.
This is done either directly in the HTML code or via various content management systems and plugins.
Conclusion
Writing SEO driven content is different. It’s not tough, but just different.
To write SEO-driven content you have to be mindful of 2 different, but complementing dimensions: writing with users in mind, and writing with bots in mind.
This dichotomy is derived from the way how we use search engines these days.
We use search engine mainly to discover and research information. Search engines provide information with websites relevant to user queries. They have to, it is their business.
And they know where that information is located due to their relentless effort to copy, tag, and index every public website in the world. This is done through computer bots that collect information throughout the internet and return it to the main library — the index.
It’s in the index and ranking endeavors where Google uses complex algorithms to present the best results in front of their users.
To make happy and returning users, search engines will first offer the websites with the most useful, engaging, relevant and unique content.
If the users are happy, they will revisit the search engine and website with informative content. They might even share it elsewhere.
Happy users are engaged. More engagement, more sharing — the better the SEO.
