How to Write Content That Will Rank On Search Engines

In SEO, the phrase “content is king” has become the leading motto of the business especially since Google’s Panda. Content is not the only success factor in SEO, but it’s the main element. The quality of content you are publishing on your website defines your success in SEO. And the kind of content you are writing is what could distinguish you from hundreds of competing websites. 


Writing content for your website needs to be done both for humans and for search engine robots. And winning that balance battle is the challenge for very content creator. You create content that humans would love and looking for more, and also include language elements that search bots understands - keywords. 

But, creating content and stuff it with keywords is a dead technique since Google’s launch of Panda update back in 2011. Before Panda, a lot of websites used to stuff pages with keywords with less importance to content quality, yet succeeded to fool search bots and rank well. 

That resulted in a poor experience for users as web pages with low quality content ranked over high quality content. Now, keep away from this black hat games to stay safe and build a solid business.

Even when you are selling a product, you need to make sure that you are not providing only the same information that users can find in hundreds of other websites. But instead, create high quality content that adds value for user and offers user a reason to stay on your page and probably order the product. 

However, writing content for SEO purposes is still a good way to do well in SEO if done carefully. 

Writing great content with wrong keywords will never give you the good results you are looking for. So, it is vital to include keywords in your content, but this shouldn’t be your main focus and your final target. 

Write great content and include targeted keywords, but make things natural if you want consistent results.  Like what Mutt Cuts, the head of Google’s WebSpam, once said “good content will trump SEO every time”.

Tips to Keyword Search

Ranking well for targeted keywords is what makes difference for your website and lead relevant traffic to your website.  But, sometimes you don’t exactly know what keywords you want to target for your page while creating content. 

When you want to target a keyword, you wonder if it is really worthy for your webpage. To find out, you can follow some basic steps.

First, you can start with a question to yourself if that keyword is what users might search to find my website. 

Second basic step is to perform searches for the keyword in major search engines and check pages that are in top ranking. Something important to notice is the number of ads above the organic search. If you see a lot of ads, then the keyword is of great value.

But, make note that it would be highly competitive as well and it will require double efforts to outrank those gurus that are already on top ranking. However, if you believe in what you do and invest great efforts in content creation, you can also do well.

Third step you can do to find relevance of a keyword is to search for it in Keyword Planner Tool. 

 

1

Go to “Search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category”.  

Note: you need to sign in to your Google account to access the tool.

2

Enter a keyword or multiple keywords then hit “Get Ideas”

3

By default you’ll get “Ad group ideas”, but what interests you is “Keyword ideas”; so click on it.

4

Then you’ll get insightful results about other keywords related to your search with their average monthly searches, competition, suggested bid…etc. 

While investigating keyword ideas provided by Keyword Planner, you can notice that people are not searching only for simple keywords consisted of 2 to 3 words. But, they are also looking for long phrases containing over than 4 or 5 words. These kinds of searches are referred to in SEO world as “long tail keywords”. 

 

Like most people that start at content creation, you may wonder what is the percentage of keywords is ideal to include in a page or what is referred to as keyword density. You may find some people giving percentages like 0.6 or the like. Just ignore that!

The ideal answer is as much as looks natural for a visitor to read without getting bored of certain words keep repeating over and over again. Include keywords in your content, ignore keyword density, and stay natural!

What you need during your content creation is not to focus only on simple keywords. But you should mix simple and long tail keywords. Experts even stated that long tail keywords are more converting than simple keywords. Meaning customers that are ready to purchase might search long tail keywords than simple keywords. 

Away from search engine bots eyes, you need to create content with human experience in mind. 

As a content writer, you need to focus as always on quality. Now, you are probably getting fed up of this “quality” word. That’s what could stand you out of the crowd.

When you plan content writing, don’t do it just because you have to but also to add value. Quality of your content is defined through different marks including how relevant and informative that content is. 

Also what makes a piece of content different from another is how that content is twisted to grab the readers’ attention and attract engagement. Yet, a piece of content full of grammatical and spelling errors won’t get your audience engaged but instead will skip away to another relevant page. 

Remember that search engine has become more sophisticated and improved to understand lexical and semantic factors of content which means that poor content with grammatical and spelling errors won’t rank in search engines.

   

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Rachid Madani

I'm here to help you reach success with your online business. I can help with content marketing, social media, SEO, and email marketing. I provide tips you can follow to build a succesful online business.