SEO Content Writing in Today’s Search Engine World

Since the birth of the Internet, marketers have been concerned with trying to work their way to the top of search engine results. The resulting SEO (Search Engine Optimization) content writing is undergoing a continual evolution as search engine technology changes. Following are two crucial factors in writing good SEO content.

Do not Keyword Bomb

Anyone who remembers the tiny blue creatures called Smurfs has probably chuckled at their tendency to substitute the word “smurf” for half the words in a given sentence. The resulting sentence often sounds like this: “Papa Smurf always says that a Smurf who smurfs smurfs will end up smurfed!!” Years ago, SEO writing also sounded this way. The gurus of the day suggested keyword densities of up to 15% as the best way to let search engines know what the page was about. The keyword density indicates the number of times per hundred words that a given keyword will appear. Imagine a two or three word phrase appearing fifteen times in a hundred word paragraph and it’s easy to see how rubbish content proliferated throughout the Internet.

In the new world of search engine algorithms, super high keyword densities will get an automatic Google slap, likely followed by a Bing slap and a Yahoo slap and so on as Google tends to set the trend for all the search engines since they have the biggest budget and therefore the most quickly evolving data sorting methods. Avoid artificially inflating the keyword density of web content like the plague.

Write for Your Site Visitors

This may seem counter-intuitive since attracting search engines and pleasing site visitors have always been targets that were very far apart. The distance between the targets was not deliberate on the part of search engines. It was a limitation imposed by the technology. Writing for people will serve two essential purposes in web content. It will gain the approval of those readers. With “likes” and similar social network voting methods being more common every day, search engines will be placing increasing weight on these end user votes to determine search engine rank. The second SEO boon of writing for people is that such a style will naturally include many LSI terms. LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) is a highbrow way of saying words that are associated with the main keyword. In other words, it is very likely that an article about insomnia will contain the phrase “sleeping pills”, so that is an LSI match for the word. Again, LSI associations are being given progressively more weight by search engines and there is no indication that the trend will not continue.

Long gone are the days of web pages containing nothing but repeated keywords ranking well in search engines. Today a content writer must do the same thing that search engines hope to do – give the site visitor a good experience.