SEO Writing: 6 Step Content Copywriting for the Search Engines
Posted by Ben Sibley on Oct 22, 2011 | 18 commentsIt’s important that you write for the people first and then write for the search engines. Once you’re sure your content is awesome you can take the following SEO writing steps for writing content for SEO.
Step 1: Choose Your Keywords
When writing a post, you should target more than one keyword. This is a more secure and effective way to optimize because it gives you a…
- Better chance to rank
- More potential organic traffic
- Easier use of related terms
You can never be sure of exactly how tough or easy it will be to rank until you’re actually competing, so don’t put all your eggs in one basket. By targeting your main keyword and 1-3 additional relevant keywords at once in when writing SEO copy, you can choose one to focus on which ever one is ranking best.
You can then build links to rank for the other keywords, one at a time. This also makes it easier to use your related terms in your content and stay relevant as well.
Step 2: Include Your Keywords
Obviously it goes without saying that you want to include your keyword, but where and how much? It’s best to include your keyword somewhere near the beginning and end of your content. However, how much you should use it… there’s no way to know.
Forget about keyword density. Google will recognize how often you used your keyword, but they also factor in how often every other page in their index with your keyword uses that keyword. There is also a normalization factor for account for the different lengths of content. Basically, the math is complex and requires variables you don’t have access to, so forget about keyword density during your SEO copywriting.
Step 3: Include “related only” words from Google
In Google’s Adword Keyword Tool, there is an option to show only ideas that are closely related to your term. After searching with this parameter selected, click on the word “Keyword” to organize the results by relevance.
You can now select a few of the top results to get very relevant phrases and keywords for writing SEO friendly content.
Step 4: Include synonyms (~)
If you search for a term in Google with a tilde (~) in front of it, Google will automatically identify and search for synonyms as well. You’re likely targeting a longer phrase, so try putting in one word at a time. Every word that is bolded in the titles of the results besides your keyword is considered a synonym.
Ex. If you search for ~guide, you will find words like “map” and “help” bolded as well. Try searching for “guide” without the tilde to see the difference.
Tip: You can change your search preferences to show 20 or 50 results at a time so you can quickly identify many synonyms without having to click through a bunch of pages.
Step 5: Include “suggest” terms
Google suggest terms are those search phrases that appear in a drop down as you type in your query. We can use suggested searches to create another set of relevant terms for our content.
There is a site that will scrape these terms for you: Uber Suggest. All you have to do is enter your keyword and it will give you the next 9 search terms + the next 10 search times after entering each letter of the internet.
Tip: Make sure you choose your language and region before using Uber Suggest
Step 6: Link internally and externally to related pages
One last step you can take to optimize your content is to link to other relevant pages. Linking out to authority sites is a good way to show Google that you have a trust-worthy site as well. It’s also helpful for your readers when you link to appropriate and useful resources.
When linking internally, you can use a related term or partial match anchor text. For instance, if you were trying to rank a page for “keyword research”, you could link with a related term like “how to do keyword research”.
If you’re more concerned with the CTR of the link, then you can use partial match and a benefit in the clickable text. For instance, if you’re trying to rank for “keyword research”, you could link with the anchor text “increase your rank with keyword research”. The benefit makes your link more appealing and you still have your keyword in the clickable text. You can also have other terms between the words of your keyword phrase if necessary.
Last SEO Writing Tip: Your link will have more weight the closer it is to the beginning of the content
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Hi I’m just new to your site. Why is it necessary to include synonyms in copy writing. Suggest terms is really important so that you can get different opinions of the reader.
TracyAnn0312 recently posted..animation job
Hey Tracy,
Whenever you write about anything you can’t help but be relevant. For example, there’s no way you would write an article about how to make spaghetti without saying noodles, pots, utensils, cooking, or loads of other relevant terms.
That being said, we can’t know exactly what Google thinks of our relevance. Since we’re not completely sure which words Google wants it’s a bit of a shot in the dark. What I try to do is be as comprehensive as I can in the hopes that I’ll appear as a very relevant result because of the broad scope of related terms I use. Using synonyms is just another way to find and include terms that Google tells us are similar/relevant.
Great tips Ben. I love all your tips. Just like to ask you one thing i am not sure about. As you suggest to include 2-3 relevant keywords with the main keyword. If we incorporate these words along with the primary keyword, wouldn’t it be considered as a keyword stuffed content? or how to manage all the keywords in such a case.
That’s a very good question Daniel, and it’s hard to answer. I think it just comes down to personal judgement. Does it look like you’re really trying to game the SEs? If so, I would use the keyword(s) less.
The goal here is to make sure that you miss out on any relevant terms that could help your content rank, not to stuff.
This is a great question indeed and my answer would be no, too. Keyword-stuffed usually refers to many keywords and no real valuable content in an article.
But using it as Ben suggests is just fine.
Ana recently posted..Aweber Review
Hey Ben,
Your tips are really profound and considerable for getting better SEO writing.That “Ubersuggest” was an update for me.It’s a great Keyword suggestion tool.I have only one small query from you,actually somebody told me to link out to the .gov and .edu links only,is it essential to do or we can link out to any one of good websites relevant to our niche??
Thank you for sharing such a valuable tips with us Ben.
Cheers!
With Regards!
Samuel Joshua
Samuel Joshua recently posted..Celtic Stained Glass Coloring Book
Hey Samuel,
I hadn’t heard of only linking to edu and gov sites. That seems like a really contrived way to link out and I wouldn’t recommend it. I think the best solution is simply to link to other sites when it would be helpful for your readers. For instance, in this article I linked out to Google’s keyword tool and ubersuggest. Both of these links help readers get to resources I recommended and add value, and they’re both good sites (obviously Google).
[EDIT] Forgot – The other link is to a guest post I did and supplements this post well.
Hi Ben,
Nice post you got there. Have to watch out for those keywords, we only need a healthy amount of it, because going a bit overboard might get it considered as spam. We really need to make the proper research using the right tools and choose wisely because our SEO highly depends on it.
Brandon Patton recently posted..Effective Online Real Estate Search
Ben,
Great topic and love the blog (just found you). This post does a nice job of boiling down the essentials into a few manageable pieces and we love the Adword Keywords tool. Will definitely stop back by.
Thanks John, that’s great to hear! The adwords tool is awesome, I’ve been looking at some more ways to use it for finding relevant keywords – will probably do another post on it soon.
UberSuggest was definitely worth the try!
Thanks for this Ben. I didnt knew such site exists after I’ve tried it. Anyway, how come that the closer the link it is to the beginning of the content, the more weight it will be?
Argie Monroy recently posted..Which Internet Marketing Method Is Best for Your Business?
Hey thanks Argie, I can’t say exactly why a link closer to the beginning carries more weight, but it is apparently a factor. My guess is that the engineers over at Google realized that pages that were most relevant got linked to sooner after they analyzed some huge amount of data. It makes sense though, I see it now that I think about it.
Interesting Article Ben for it could help everyone especially to the beginners. I agree that it is important to chose and include your keyword all the time for it would give you a chance to be in higher rank and easier to find such related topics in SEO.
advanced SEO technique recently posted..Terms & Conditions
Another set of useful tips Ben. I agree that internal linking is a great way to tell the search bots what our content is about but is very under-utilised. I like the tip for finding synonyms using the ~ symbol. I didn’t know you could do that, thanks!
Sean recently posted..Google Places SEO – Google Places Ranking Factors
Hey Sean,
Thanks for your comment, I love when my readers can find something new here!
Quite helpful and awesome tips… Every writers need to know this steps, really helpful them to write seo content..
nice tips.I will surely use them.
Btw I think you could be a good writer for a book related on seo.
Take care and thanks.