What steps are you taking with your business to rank higher on Google? Have you even started thinking about it yet? Google is one of the most widely used search engines used today, making its ranking process an important one. Your content writing needs to appeal to your users and provide real value. Although there are many factors that affect how you rank within Google, the purpose of this post is to solely talk about content writing and keywords. In my experience, there are several simple rules to be followed when utilizing both, today I will discuss 6 of those rules.
Content Writing Rule Number 1: Write for Humans
I have touched on this topic in many of my past blogs, but I will say it again here; content is king. It is very important to make sure you have solid and unique content. Always write your content for humans not search engines.
Your content needs to engage your readers and compel them to take action. It needs to be interesting, relevant and informational. They days of key word stuffing and only writing for search engines are over. By writing content for humans, you are writing for search engines. You need to think beyond PageRank (learn how here) and understand that optimizing for users is more effective than optimizing for engines.
Content Writing Rule Number 2: Create Content Rich Sites
SerpIQ analyzed the top 10 search results over 20,000 keywords and noticed a very important pattern that I have to share. The average content length for a web page that ranks in the top 10 results for any keyword on Google has at least 2,000 words. The higher up you go on the search listings page, the more content that is found on each page.
An interesting part about the above stat is that Google doesn’t actually like content rich sites because they feel they are more valuable, it is because we as readers like them better. It is shown that people stay on content rich sites longer and are willing to link to sites with more content than those lacking content.
Content Writing Rule Number 3: Social Media Helps
Content isn’t necessarily great in the marketing world until it is shared or passed along to others. In order to get your content noticed, you need to incorporate social media tools like Twitter, Google+ and Facebook onto your sites. Promoting your content is just as important, if not more important than even writing the content.
Make sure you build up your social media accounts to have many followers. The sites that do well are those who have built up their social presence in addition to the amount and quality of content on their sites. Build your social sites up first, then start increasing the quantity and quality of your content to promote it.
Content Writing Rule Number 4: No Keyword Stuffing
We all know what keyword stuffing is; the practice of inserting a large number of keywords into our web content and meta descriptions in an attempt to fool Google, artificially increasing page rankings in the search rankings to drive more traffic.
If you know what it is, you should also know it is considered to be very unethical in the SEO world. In addition to being unethical, per Google’s ranking methods, it is also ineffective. Google can now tell when content is not relevant, out of context or simply just doesn’t make sense.
So you’re probably wondering what to do with all the keywords you have researched then. You can still use keywords, but instead of stuffing them anywhere and everywhere they don’t make sense, you simply incorporate them as they are needed and as they do indeed make sense.
Optimize your site with valuable keywords. This includes all tags for images and meta-page information at the least. There is no reason to over stuff and write your content for keywords only, but a fair amount does bring value to your website. Again, first write your content for humans and then add in keywords when where they are appropriate.
Content Writing Rule Number 5: Don’t Let Your Content Go Stale
The best way to keep people coming to your website is by constantly providing new, compelling and interesting content. A great way to do this is by incorporating a blog on your site. A blog is useful because you can then have a content schedule and update it often.
Writing about your products, industry and general current marketing information are all great topics to focus on. After the Penguin update, Google recommends posting new and quality content to get more traffic to your site. In addition to being updated, it needs to be unique content. You can’t simply copy and paste something you have seen elsewhere; it does need to be original.
Content Writing Rule Number 6: No Duplicate Content
Avoiding duplicate content can be hard, especially if you are managing more than one site for the same business. No matter how hard it is, make sure you do not do it. Google’s algorithms really don’t take kindly to duplicate content.
In addition to affecting your Google ranking, duplicate content creates a negative user experience for your readers. It also has a way of negatively affecting your brand credibility and integrity as a leader in your industry. Decreased traffic is yet another negative effect. You can learn about avoiding duplicate content in this post from our SEO experts.
Final Thoughts:
As I mentioned, there are many rules and tips I can share with you about your website content and how to use it to your advantage for higher rankings; however I can really sum it up in one final thought. Focus on the end user and your target audience. If you do this, you will see your rankings naturally go up. Think about your target market, what they need, and their goals, and then incorporate into your website content.