Blogs are a
great
online avenue for businesses looking to promote their brand, industry, products,
or services. Businesses can use social-media accounts and blogs as news sites
as well. You won't satisfy clients and readers until you understand how
Search
Engine Optimization works and how important it is for your content to stand
out in a search engine.
It's important to write content that will stand out to both
human readers and the
algorithm that runs the search engine. As a writer, you don't have to learn the technical
aspects of SEO in order to effectively get your work picked up by search
engines, but by understanding the basics your work will come across to readers.
Just by knowing the basics of SEO your work will become more visible to search
engines and human readers alike.
Each article has an important set of keywords which are
picked up by search engine "spiders"
which compiles an index for each website and page it comes across, in a process
called crawling. Search engines then pick up on this information when deciding
results for a specific search. What this means is your words have to be chosen
carefully by using the same words a search engine user would use to search the
topic of your blog article. Most writers' keywords come naturally when writing
especially if writing about a topic you already know about.
Since the evolvement
of search engines; there has been a shift in how rankings appear after a
search has been made. Back in the day many thought "keyword
stuffing" and repeating the same words over and over in order to up your
rankings was a good idea. Now writers have to balance their keyword usage with
the whole article in order to rank high.
Organize your writing using headline and subheads to make it
easier for software to pick up on what you're trying to emphasize. Subheads can
contain secondary keywords and can be found in the beginning of a paragraph.
Incorporating subheadings in your SEO friendly blog article can be difficult at
times, but writers have even used them in creative fiction so you can to.
Include anchor
text as links. If you use links in your writing, they should be clickable
and choose carefully when picking out the text the reader will click on. When a
spider crawls a new web page, they analyze the anchor text and use that as a
guide to understand what the page content is about. A common
anchor text mistake is "click here," which isn't useful for search engines.
When writing about a specific person or company you should incorporate anchor
text relevant to that company or person so search engines make the connection
to the right person or company.
It's also noteworthy to understand that links
affect your rankings. Search engines consider a link as a type of "vote"
telling the ranking algorithm that an article has value. If you use a higher
ranked link in your anchor text, the search engines will associate it with that
higher ranked article and your article will hopefully move up in search
listings.
Keep an eye out for search-engine news. Search engines
are constantly evolving to meet consumer needs and it is important to understand
new algorithms in order to obtain higher rankings on search engines. As the
writer you don't need to worry about the technical aspects of the website as
much as you should worry about what new aspects of your writing the search
engine takes into consideration when doing a search.
Don't let the quality of your writing suffer because of SEO.
The quality of your work is what will keep a reader coming back to your site.
Remember a blog written purely for search engines will grant you more rankings
but will steer the actual readers away. Remember it's all about quality within
you're writing.
A great blog starts off with knowing how to write. Making
the blog
SEO friendly should come second to
writing it well. Search engines will have no trouble navigating through your
page when your article is written to the readers standards. This may take some
time, but after you find the perfect balance between SEO and your blog, you
will ultimately have the perfect SEO friendly blog.