4 Writing Tips to Optimize Your Content for SEO

Writing good content to boost your SEO efforts is all but a simple task – you need to provide our audience with something unique and interesting enough to keep them from going away after the first two sentences. You want to engage your readers with an article that is easy to read to account for the vastly reduced attention span that comes with the modern lifestyle. You still want your columns to be insightful enough to provide them with something they didn’t read over and over again in a million other blogs. Is that enough?

No. It isn’t. Because on top of all this, if your article is not SEO-optimized enough, Google isn’t going to pick it – at all. And if your website’s ranking is not high enough, no one is going to read your articles, and you simply wasted your time writing a masterpiece like this one. Okay, maybe not like this one, but…

Bottom line, when you write you need to keep a vigilant eye on a few special techniques that can go a long way towards improving your SEO rankings.

1. Optimize your meta description and title

Look at the first sentence that I wrote in this article. If you pay close attention, you will see that it includes all the keywords I want this article to be indexed for: writing, SEO, content, boosting. Even more importantly, I focused on what Google looks for: the user intent. What are people who read this article looking for? Learn how to improve their content and their SEO efforts.

The first sentence is the one that Google is going to use as a meta description. Together with the title, it forms the so-called snippet, which is the first place the Search Engine it’s going to look for when deciding what is your content about and where it should be ranked.

2. The keyword theory has changed

Do you remember back in 2015 every SEO expert had a different recipe for keyword density based on percentages and distribution? Well, we’re not in 2017 anymore, don’t we? Things have changed to some extent. Keyword density is not as important as it used to be, and the ghost of the dreaded keyword stuffing is now more present than ever.

However, you still want to distribute your keywords organically through your content if you want to rank for them. Write naturally though, and try to make a proper use of potential synonyms to boost that page’s Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI).

If you’re in doubt about what keywords you should look for, read this post to learn how to run a full page audit that allows you to check from where people are coming from (i.e. look for the queries that work better for you).

3. Write focused paragraphs with proper headings

Headings are still as relevant as they used to. However, what is even more important is what you write the paragraph. Each heading tells Google which ones are the secondary topics you want to cover, and the more you go in-depth by covering every angle, the more the Almighty Search Engine God will be satisfied by your work.

Therefore, if you have the main idea but want to digress, focus that digression within a paragraph with its heading. If you want to take another smaller detour within that same section, include a subheading. A neatly organized structure will also help your users navigate through the content and enjoy it even more.

To help you refine your writing process, read this post at Distilled about writing more focused content that Google loves.

4. Use internal links to increase your traffic

Internal links are useful to tell people “if you want to know more about this thing, just click here.” Most of the time, an individual who hovers over a link will get a better impression if that link points to another internal page of your site rather than towards an external blog.

It will give you more authority since it demonstrates that you can write about that other thing too, and it’s a good way to make your business radiate trust and transparency. Read this post if you want to know how to make your brand feel more authentic (see what I just did there?) since you will be guiding them through your website.

And it’s helpful for SEO too. First, because it brings you more traffic to other pages you may want to boost. Second, because an internal link is still a link, and Google appreciates them all. Bow down in front of the Everlasting Google Divinity and bring you link offerings, mortal. It’s also very helpful to make your link structure more natural.

The tips to write more SEO-oriented articles are endless, and to cover them all, you would need a 5,000 words guide. However (and that’s bonus tip number 5), you should always keep under 700-800 words for most blog posts to avoid boring or scaring your audience away!

What do you do optimize your content? Share your tactics in the comments.

Read More: 9 SEO Writing Tips for Bloggers