Does SEO content writing imply just a series of tricks meant to satisfy search engines? This is indeed a common belief, and some part of it is actually right. The wrong part is perceiving these tricks as a negative, unlawful method of climbing to the top of the search engine rankings. Actually, SEO content writing is not all about tricking, fooling or deceiving search engines, but using the knowledge about their functioning wisely.
As long as you know how a search engine does its job, you can use this knowledge in order to create search engine friendly content that will appear on the first pages of search engine listings, and that many people will have access to. The important thing is to avoid excesses and never compromise the content quality. A serious, wise and decent SEO content writing strategy would be to follow the guidelines provided by the search engines while continuing to write quality, easy to read, entertaining, and useful text.
A few considerations about the “psychology” of search engines
1. Search engines rely on keywords to determine the relevancy of a text for a certain topic.
This is no secret: SEO content writing implies using keyword phrases. This is, perhaps, the most distinctive characteristic of SEO content writing. Choosing the most relevant, descriptive and searched for keywords is the first task of every SEO content writer. How the keywords will be inserted in the text is another issue and has more to do with literary talent than with SEO.
2. Search engines expect to find a specific keyword density.
Using the keyword just once in the article is not enough to convince search engines that your article offers valuable information about that keyword. In other words, search engines need to be persuaded.
A 1% keyword density is considered good, while other writers suggest a higher density, of 2.5% or 3%. The risk is to overuse the keywords, or stuff them, something which search engines consider spamming. Using an avalanche of arguments to persuade somebody might backfire.
3. Search engines expect to find keywords placed in key positions.
Using keywords is not enough for a healthy SEO content writing strategy. You also have to place them in the most important positions of the article. The first one is, of course, the headline. Using a headline without a keyword is the one of the most childish mistakes a SEO content writer could make. Then comes the subheading.
Other places where search engines will definitely look for keywords are the first and the last paragraph. And there are also other places where keywords should be found: in the meta tags, title tags and image tags. But this task is not always found among the attributions of a SEO content writer.
As you can see, writing content for SEO doesn’t have many secrets or tricks. Knowing how search engines scan and rank texts can help you adapt your writing to those requirements, so your articles will be among the first ones displayed on the search results page.
SEO content writing is definitely not an obscure method of writing texts, because everyone has access to the necessary information for writing great SEO content.
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