Are you wondering what separates SEO content from other forms of marketing-oriented written communication? The key to creating effective SEO content lies with recognizing that the information published on your website has to be carefully constructed to appeal to both readers and search engines.

3 Tips for Effective SEO Content Marketing

• Include Key Phrases—SEO content should include key phrases that represent the types of terms used by the people who are searching for what your company has to offer. Including appropriate key phrases in marketing content is the best way to attract organic traffic to your website.
• Publish Only Quality Content—It’s essential to publish quality content on your website. When visitors find their way to your site, the quality of the information provided will have an impact on whether or not they want to learn more about your organization and, ultimately, if they’ll choose to do business with you. Look at it this way: key phrases may drive visitors to your website, but the quality of the content itself will determine if they choose to stay there for a while.
• Add New Content Regularly—It’s important to add new, professionally written SEO content to your website on a regular basis. This helps with search engine ranking because search engine algorithms tend to rank websites that are updated frequently higher than others. Additionally, frequent content additions can help capture new website visitors and encourage repeat visits.

Mary Gormandy White is co-founder of Mobile Technical Institute, where she works with clients throughout the U.S. as a professional trainer, consultant, and speaker, focusing on topics related to HR, management, and public relations. She has extensive professional writing experience and is the author of 101 Human Resource Management Tips and 101 Successful PR Campaign Tips in the LifeTips book series.

Image from bostonwebcreative.com

 

1. Pay attention to quality from the beginning. Curdled milk won’t taste sweet no matter how much chocolate syrup you pour into it, and content marketing won’t succeed if your content is nothing more than a couple of mediocre paragraphs stuffed with keywords. You should hire a freelance writer whose copy is polished, professional, and free of spelling and grammatical errors.
2. Quantity and quality go hand in hand. Too little syrup leaves a glass of chocolate milk pale and underwhelming, while too much just makes you sick. The same goes for SEO content. Hire writers who are able to strike the right balance, optimizing your content with a variety of keywords, but avoiding an overdose that would only leave readers distracted and annoyed.
3. Don’t forget to stir. SEO may be about marketing content, but you also want to improve conversion rates, and potential customers appreciate a company website or blog packed with well-crafted, relevant content, not random keywords. When you’re hiring writers,  find someone with a talent for mixing keywords into good content like chocolate syrup in a glass of milk, till the two are blended seamlessly. The final product is guaranteed to be both delicious and nutritious for your customers and your company.

Whimsical metaphors aside, the quality of the writing and the skillful use of keywords on your site or in your blog should be integral factors in your marketing strategy. If you want to achieve the best possible results, hire a content marketing agency with plenty of experience in blending these ingredients just the right way.

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Emily Robinson is a fiction writer and an editorial intern at ideaLaunch. After her final semester of college, she intends to become a copyeditor and/or a starving novelist.

Remember when you were in elementary school and you had to write an essay or paragraph using specific vocabulary words? You couldn’t always get the words to fit, so you’d add them to the story in awkward ways.
Some people do this with keywords in their SEO content. They stick keywords where they don’t fit naturally in order to reach a particular keyword density. This is different than keyword stuffing, where you use too many keywords for the article length. Awkwardly-placed keywords may not hurt your search engine rankings, but you’ll lose readers. (Or at least lose their respect.)

Avoid Keyword Stuffing, Too
Since we mentioned it, it’s worth a reminder to avoid keyword stuffing. Search engines look for a keyword density of 2 to 3 %. For every 100 words in your SEO content, two or three can be one of your keywords.

Professional Writers Deliver Transparent SEO Content
It’s amazing how much cringeworthy SEO content you’ll find on the Web—content that sounds like it was written by a fifth grader. The average reader shouldn’t be able to recognize carefully placed, relevant keywords within an article.

If you’re looking for SEO content with keywords that sound natural and fit with the flow of an article, hire professional writers. Using keywords in SEO content is an art you don’t notice when it’s done properly.

Dawn Allcot is a full-time freelance writer and blogger. She frequently writes about technology, business, parenting and paintball.

Image from smh.com.au

Many SEO specialists have a specific percentage of keyword density they wish to target in a given page’s content. This percentage is determined by factors such as the specificity of the page, the navigation level of the page, the organic competition of the keywords, keyword quality scores in pay-per-click advertising campaigns and the professional opinion of the SEO content manager.

In order to ensure that content that is optimally created is deployed correctly, make sure that headlines use the H1 meta tag and that headings inside the content use the H2 meta tag. Good SEO content writers consider how these tags are weighted by the search engines when they determine how to write the headline or heading. Use of these tags is an industry standard and is considered important by a majority of search engines.

Jennifer Gniadecki loves to write. You can find her on any given day writing lists, blog posts, articles, assignments, outlines or fleshing out story ideas on her laptop.

Image from prospectmx.com

• Rate of pay
• Deadlines
• Kill fee (should you not use the work that is provided as per the contract)
• Publication rights (i.e., how you are permitted to use the work and for how long)

Start with a Meeting
Communication with the writers you hire doesn’t stop with the contract. Launch the project with a meeting (either phone or face-to-face) to make sure the writer understands your needs, your company culture, and the “voice” you want to see represented in the content produced.

Mini Meetings Keep Everyone On the Same Page
Follow up with 20-minute “mini meetings” in which you can discuss progress as well as any changes or refinements to the editorial content.

Decide How You Want to Communicate
As the client, you get to decide how to communicate with the writer. But finding a solution agreeable to you both will pave the way to a positive, productive relationship. You can communicate with the writers you hire through:

• Instant messenger
• Email
• Phone calls

Whatever method you choose, weekly updates are important to keep the project on track.

Dawn Allcot is a full-time freelance writer and blogger. She frequently writes about technology, business, parenting and paintball.

Image from acl.com

1. Do you consider search engine optimization to be part of writing copy?
2. How many keyword phrases do you typically include in a page’s content?
3. What percentage of the text do you normally have as targeted keywords?
4. How do you proceed if the keywords a client provides will not fit into the text due to tense or part of speech?
5. How would you proceed if you realize the client has provided you with keywords that do not seem to match the industry or subject of the webpage the content is being written for?
6. If you finish the copy for a page and realize that you overused the keywords due to the subject how will you modify the copy?

As more copy writing is focused on the web, it is more important to make sure that when hiring writers they understand the basics of SEO and are able to write to optimize for the keyword phrases that are being targeted.

Jennifer Gniadecki loves to write. You can find her on any given day writing lists, blog posts, articles, assignments, outlines or fleshing out story ideas on her laptop.

Image from currentliving.files.wordpress.com

Viral Titles

Creating a clever title is a challenge. However, if a title catches on with customers your reputation will improve as people search for the title to find out more. Often an article or blog post with a clever title will go viral as people pass the piece on to colleagues and friends. Catchy titles are often used most in email campaigns, pay-per-click marketing, blogs, articles and news releases.

Targeted Titles

In most cases, the article that follows the title is not where the website owner wants the visitor to end their visit. An effective way to draw in more qualified traffic is to have the end goal in mind when writing headlines and titles. If a specific article is targeting a specific service, then using the keywords used on that service’s specific page will help boost the SEO content value.

Branded Titles

For companies that have good brand recognition, it is often advantageous to include Branded terms as part of the title. When used in addition to a top level keyword, this communicates clearly to a prospective customer so only those visitors most likely to convert into customers visit the site.

Jennifer Gniadecki loves to write. You can find her on any given day writing lists, blog posts, articles, assignments, outlines or fleshing out story ideas on her laptop.

Image from popgadget.net

What the Heck Is Meta Data?

For those of us who are fairly new to SEO, let alone writing for SEO, here’s a little glossary (and photos! Click to enlarge.):

1. Title Tag: This appears in the blue bar above your browser, and it’s also the clickable link that shows up on search engine results pages.
   

   Courtesy of tailored.com

2. Meta Description: “A marketing statement that describes what the page is about. No more, no less.”
   

   Courtesy of cafepress.com

3. Meta Keyword Tag: A list of the keywords that search engines see to gauge what your page is all about.
   

   Courtesy of mcbuzz.com

So What?! Or, What To Do with Meta Data

1. Title Tags: These puppies are important. Think about it: you’re looking for something on the Internet. You want to find a place to eat, so you search, “Restaurants Boston.” Below the results for businesses in Boston, there are web sites that are begging you to visit them. Like any hungry person who doesn’t want to spend dinnertime reading every web site Google has found with the relatively vague search terms “restaurants” and “Boston,” you skim the names: “Boston Restaurants—restaurant reviews and dining recommendations” and “Boston, MA Restaurant Reviews and Recommendations by CitySearch.” Go a little farther down and you’ll see this promising title tag: “Boston Restaurants, Dentists, Bars, Beauty Salons, Doctors.” Chances are, you’re not going to click on this one. You’re starving. You don’t want to risk searching through beauty salons and doctors and dentists, oh my! So be direct, and get relevant keywords in there if you can. You only have about 70 characters (with spaces) on this one.
2. Meta Descriptions: This one is the description below the title tag on the search engine results page. You get about 175 characters so you can be a little more creative. Try to include a benefit, one or two keyphrases, your company name and a call to action. Don’t be alarmed, however, if search engines like Google bypass your meta description and displays the portion of text from your site that contains the keyword or phrase being searched. There’s no way to foresee when this will happen, but there are ways to work with this system. Heather has some great tips on ensuring this detour can work for you as well, and shares them throughout the lesson and the course. (Didn’t think I’d give away all her secrets, now did you?)
3. Meta Keyword Tags: This used to be shady-SEO Heaven. People would stuff random, unrelated words that had high search volume just to drive people to their site. Search engines have long since smartened up to this, so only include relevant keywords. Each of these sets of keywords should be unique to each page, so focus on the words and phrases you use on that particular page.

Phew! That doesn’t sound so bad, does it? It really isn’t. It doesn’t mean you have to read code or even look at it, but understanding how all of your fabulous content is being found helps you create better content for the search engines. And that’s really all we want, right? So, get out there; write some kick-butt content then meta describe the heck out of it!

Sadly, we’re nearing the end of our series. Is there anything in particular that stumps you about SEO copywriting? Leave a question in the comments, and I’ll address it next week!

Last week, I enlightened you all on keyphrase research, and this week we finally get to do some writing. My favorite! SuccessWorks’ copywriting course contains some great tips on where your keyphrases should go, how many times they should appear and how to implement them into your copy, both old and new.

Where Do Keyphrases Belong?

• Headlines
• Sub-headlines
• Hyperlinks
• Sprinkled organically throughout your copy

See that word up there? Organically. Heather says there’s no magic number for how many times your phrases should appear in your copy. If you focus on the flow of your copy rather than technical aspects you and your customers will be much happier. There are two ways to treat your web site once you’ve compiled your keyphrase arsenal: keyphrase editing and original writing.

Keyphrase Editing

Ideal for:

• Articles
• White papers
• FAQ pages
• About Us pages
• Category and Subcategory pages
• Older blog posts

Not ideal for:

• Home pages
• Crucially important sales pages
• Product pages

Original Copywriting

Heather compares this method with building your own house, starting from the ground up. She suggests getting organized before putting your fingers to keys. That thought bubble above your head should say two things: Benefits and Action.

• Take five minutes to brainstorm and outline your ideas
• Jot down relevant links
• Write down essential components of your copy
• List benefits for your customers
• Narrow down the action your customers should take

I love this lesson, particularly because I love writing, but also because she does a great job of highlighting the important aspects of copywriting that sometimes get lost in the SEO craze. She stresses that it’s about the writing, the tone and the information. She brings dignity back to writing copy for (gasp!) marketing purposes. If you can communicate that you care about your product or service, your readers will pick up on that and become customers.

My favorite part of the lesson comes toward the end. I write fiction, and one of the hardest parts (and thus, the most important) of writing is editing. Heather encourages the use of shorter paragraphs with white space, efficient language (“Don’t say in five words what you can say in three.”), bulleted lists and engaging copy. After all, it doesn’t matter how easy your site is to read if it puts your readers to sleep.

Next week, we’ll be traveling back in time to that keyphrase editing I mentioned earlier. Come join me. Back in time.

In the first few lessons, I learned about researching keyphrases instead of keywords. This week, I learned what the heck to do with those keyphrases. The copy writing course covers keyphrases and copy writing for the small business owner. While I don’t own a small business, I am still learning a lot from the perspective of a copy writer. Any copy writer can get a list of keywords or phrases and stick them into a bunch of copy, but truly understanding the purpose of those keyphrases and inbound links ensures better copy. It’s like that whole “Teach a man to fish” thing. You get it. And so,

What the Heck Do I Do with Keyphrases?

1. Develop a Strategy: There’s a myth that you can only use one keyphrase per page and one page per keyphrase. Throw that thinking out! Choose keyphrases that can appear and be relevant on multiple pages. (This is a great opportunity for internal linking as well!)
2. Examine Keyphrases: Are they applicable? Are they grammatically correct? Will you be able to put them in your content in an organic way? (If not, lose them. Readers can see right through awkward phrasing for SEO purposes. Don’t jeopardize your credibility.)
3. Create a List: Organize your keyphrases into type (Brand, Category, Buy Cycle, Subcategory, etc.).
4. Divide and Conquer: Decide which keyphrases to use for specific pages. Map it out in a comprehensible manner for easy reference.
5. This Just In: Update your keyphrase list. Depending on your business, this can happen every month or every quarter or seasonally.

This list is just the bare bones of what the course offers. If you’re new to SEO copy writing, Heather maps out exactly what you should be doing with great examples of ideal home pages. In the key phrase mapping lesson, she provides a template to plug in your specific keyphrases.

Next week’s lesson? WRITING. Stay tuned. Or just hire a writer.