Content is king: SEO-driven blog writing techniques

Hello 2.0′ers! Today we are going to look at ways you could improve your website, as well as your outlook on your site in general through SEO-driven blog writing techniques and more importantly linking techniques with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind.

Content Is King

We’ve all heard the saying before - but how many of us actually believe it? 9/10 times, the reason visitors come back is good content. It could mean the difference between a one-time viewer and a subscriber to your blog. Make sure your content is clear, and well written. More importantly, find out which writing style you want to tackle and stick with it - whether it be informative, educative, personal, or friendly - you will find your writing style can and does bring visitors back time after time. Well written content adds credibility to your list of ‘reasons to come back to this blog/site’. The most important thing that I find most people forget is the whole notion of target audience. In most circumstances, you should try to make sure your content is accessible to search engines - i.e. internal linking, well-structured blog posts (header, section, content, etc) and sure, sometimes you may change your writing style to ‘help push’ the search engine result up; but the main thing to remember is to write your content for people first, search engines second! In essence, you need to make sure that your content is understandable to humans. A good example of this is in one blog post/article - trying to link the user to a related topic:

The two most-used blog writing techniques/methods

The SEO/search engine bot friendly approach:

Example A … More info on Search engine optimization here.

Sure, you might think the quicker you get the link across the better, right? Wrong! Firstly, that’s not only incorrect linking, but means nothing to the viewer! In Example A, What is the article going to be about? Will it be relevant to what they want to read? Is there a chance you are just trying to spam them into a click? Too many choices in the viewer’s mind = bad start! It means a) potentially missing out on a link-out to content on those all important internal pages, as well as b) It’s not helping your SEO one bit! (Well, okay, maybe one bit!) Let’s look at another alternative…

The human-friendly & SEO/search engine bot friendly approach:

Example B … It’s really not that hard to get Search engine optimization right, if you take your time. Feel free to check out a previous article on the topics of SEO and backlinks. or better yet, Example C … If you take your time with it, It’s really not that hard to get Search engine optimization right! If backlinks and their affect on SEO tickle your fancy, check out this previous article on the topic.

Now we’re talking! Let’s review Example B! With Example B, the first thing that is awesome is that we have wrapped up the previous paragraph nicely. So you are coming down to the end of your post; that’s the best way to wrap things up! You basically say something along the lines of: ‘and as you can see, it’s easy to ….” or “finally, it’s clear that a is better than b…” - by doing that, it gives you a great launching pad into another article - which ultimately means the viewer doesn’t stop reading! Moving on, we have provided ourself with not one, but two (hopefully internal) links! The first link, ‘Search engine optimization‘ could easily link to our SEO tag or category pages!? Google loves that!!! The second link ‘previous article’ can then direct the user to the actual article! Cool ayh? We can even go one better! Example C goes one step further and then some! By re-thinking what you are trying to link to, as well as the current flow of your article/blog post you can come across not only sounding more professional, but boost your SEO-power as well! Let’s collect our thoughts on the uber Example C: a) As unimportant as you might think it is, by simply re-wording the fragment, we have created a sense of ‘inspiration’ with our writing style, and that always helps to keep readers interested in what you have to say! b) The first link ‘Search engine optimization’, just like before, can lead us to the blog’s tag or category page on the topic. This is crazy for your SEO (in the good way!) as it leads on to every other post, which we’d hope would be related content! Not only that, it means (unless you have disallowed them in your robots.txt file), Googlebot and other Search engine robots, have just crawled all those other posts as well! Wicked! c) The second link, ‘backlinks and their affect on SEO’ is an important one! Let’s think about it logically - we humans type very weird things into search engines - and believe it or not, looking through my logs, I have been on the receiving end of 93 unique hits for that exact phrase typed into Google! What I’m trying to say is that it is fairly easy to make it into high SERP’s in search engines like Google and Yahoo! The best way to do that is to afford yourself some key terms which link out; both, encouraging users to click - and at the same time, fulfilling thier click-through - i.e. getting them to some place meaningful, not tricking them for your benefit! In wrapping up the second link of Example C, ‘backlinks and their affect on SEO’, we can see we have got three great, connected keywords: backlinks, affect, SEO. It’s easy to see how all that can mean inbound traffic from search engines! And you didn’t even have to try hard! c) Lastly, the final link ‘this previous article’ can either be the same link as ‘backlinks and their affect on SEO’ or, if the second link has taken the user to another section of the blog/site discussing SEO and what affects it, then the final link can, and really should be the actual link to the previous article. Gosh, I nearly confused myself there! In simple terms - both links can go to the same place, or not! it’s really up to you; the best part is you have another link to play with! However, as you can see, the paragraph says: ‘check out this previous article on the topic’ - hence, logically, it should take the user to that article. Please don’t get ’shifty’ and do something else! You will possibly lose a potential subscriber/reader and probably do some harm to your search engine rankings.

Closing statements

So there you have it! Putting it all together might be a little crazy at first - but if you follow these simple steps to success; It might be slow at first, but you should start to notice small changes in your search engine results position (SERP). Just stick at it, take it one day at a time, and remember, you don’t have to be a billion dollar corporation to make it into Google! All it takes is some thought and determination. Subscribe to the RSS feed for more updates and/or Stumbleupon/digg this page (bookmark button, below) if you enjoyed it! Thanks for your company!