Best Practices for SEO Writing

• Michael Simonetti
• 10 years ago
• Categories: Advice, Articles & Events
• Tags: Content Writing, Online Strategy, SEO

Best Practices and General Rules for SEO Writing

Why is writing good SEO content important? It means the content you write will be found more often, assuming of course you pick keywords that are not too competitive.

This is a document, Best Practices for SEO writing, we’ve shared with many of our clients looking to self-develop great Search Optimised content for their websites. &Mine have seen consistently better and better results from the launch of each new Algorithm update on Google, so we are doing something right. With the Hummingbird in late 2013 we saw another positive jump of 15% on average for all out clients organic Traffic. Why the great results? Probably as we are not offshoring to the thousands of SEO companies slowly going out of business …we are now getting at least 4 emails or calls a day from these doggy, black-hat burn outs, so we know they are on the way to extinction (thank goodness).

The below assumes a little knowledge about SEO Writing and on-page optimisation, if you have questions or would like support, feel free to contact us. You don’t have to follow every single step, as good article writing itself is a big enough challenge (well it often is for me). But all of these tips have been designed from the best-practice evolution around our white-hat (or legal) SEO over the last few years.

Overall, if you write good, valuable content, people will eventually find you and this will grow your search traffic as it gets shared online. This idea balanced with a bit of best-practice SEO will serve you well as you join the lead generating, content popularity and digital publishing revolution.

You Will Need

A Keyword List of long-tail and short-tail keywords you want to compete on. &Mine generates these documents for clients and takes around 20 hours to do well. Without going into a lot of detail, especially as Google is moving everyone away from specific keyword you can do this by Google searching keywords and evaluate how competitive the keywords are OR using the more detailed adwords tools – which come with a larger learning curve.

SEO Writing – Best Practice Tips:

1. Select 2 keywords from the list when a number of keywords are available. Out of the selected 2 keywords, select one as high priority keyword and another one as medium priority keyword.
2. Keep sentences which use keywords short and concise, Long sentences will complicate the grammar. Keep it short and simple.  No one likes to read sentences that are too long and that asks for reading the sentence again and again to understand its meaning.
3. Create a good and meaningful title that sounds natural using the keyword. Make sure that the titles are completely relevant to the contents. Also See: https://www.andmine.com/blog/how-to-title-a-blog-post-for-seo-wins/
4. Use sub-headings where possible. Create minimum 3 to 4 subheadings per article. Subheading enhances the readability of the content
5. As a general rule, write articles of around 400 words (only if the word count has not been specified). Do not write very short contents posts as Google likes pages with decent amount of words say 300-400
6. Do intensive research on keywords and related search terms before starting to write and think of new angles to create articles. A great tip is to write articles on obscure keywords which have little competition. You can also check this using our article on titles – https://www.andmine.com/blog/how-to-title-a-blog-post-for-seo-wins/

SEO Keywords Usage:

1. Use both the High and Medium priority keywords 2-3 times each in the content.
2. Do not alter or change the keywords.  Keywords should be used exactly the way they are constructed. Eg if your keyword is “DYI Carpet Laying”, don’t change it in the document to “Carpet Laying DIY”. If the content requires using the keyword more than 2-3 times, then use these variations or synonyms.
3. Use keywords grammatically in the sentences/contents without forcing them in, this is very important otherwise your article will read poorly.
4. Create a good and meaningful title that sounds natural using the primary keyword. Secondary keyword can be used for subheadings.
5. Using keywords (or synonym of keywords) is a good idea as subheadings can be used as h2, h3, h4 tags. (note: These tags will require programming into your website). Multiple sub-headings are also recommended with an escalating hierarchy of H value (H2, H3, H4).
6. Make sure that the contents are absolutely relevant to the titles.
7. Use around 4 sentences in each paragraph. Try not exceeding more than 4 sentences as it enhances the readability of the paragraph for Google and will assist in your Keyword Placement
8. Use the primary keyword once in the first paragraph and once in the last paragraph. Keywords can also be used in between the article, but by spacing them well
9. Never use the same keywords twice in the same paragraph.

How to Write SEO Titles:

1. Create a good and meaningful title that sounds natural using the primary keyword. Secondary keyword can be used for subheadings.
2. The first letter of each word in the title should be in uppercase (Capital Letters)

2. The title should always be created by using the primary keyword in it. For example, if the keyword given to you is, “Weight Loss Pills”. You can make a title like, “Excellent Solutions For Great Health With Weight Loss Pills”.

4. Keywords alone are not the titles of the articles. Please create a title which will have the keywords in it. The title has to make sense grammatically. Hyphen (-) can be used to separate the two phrases in the title but avoid using any other special character in the title. Example: Weight Loss Pills – Excellent Solutions For Great Health

Things not to do when Writing SEO articles:

1. Try to write only positive things in relation to the keywords. Do not to write anything negative about the keyword.
2. Do not fabricate any sentences unless you are sure they are facts (Write only facts). Add supporting evidence with a URL where possible.
3. Do not force sentences if you get stuck trying to push keywords into them. It is better the content flows more fluidly than stuffing in keywords.