Over the past several months I have been reading as many articles on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as I could get my hands on. There are many differing opinions out there on the best way to achieve good SEO. I am going to share my most important findings in this article.
Writing rich content will improve your SEO.
The most important SEO strategy that I found was either not in most of the articles or, in a list of 10 things to improve your SEO was at number 6 to 8 and barely rated a mention. Very few articles cover any aspect of writing the content of your post or page so that it is SEO compliant and keyword rich. Without good content the rest of the SEO is useless or leads to people taking up bad practices to attempt to achieve their desired SEO outcome.
Write for human readers.
When writing the content for your web pages or blog posts, just cover one or two related subjects in an article. Too many topics will confuse your readers. Keep your writing to the point and try not to stray off on some tangent. Write your page or post for a human reader and not for what you think a search engine is looking for in SEO because you will probably be wrong. Try to present your concepts simply so that you will appeal to a larger readership. You never know who is reading your work.
Many of the articles I read spoke about the importance of making your articles keyword rich on the one hand and how, if you are stuffing your pages and posts with too many keywords, your page ranking (PR) would likely fall on the other. My advice would be to forget about search engine optimisation altogether while you are writing your articles.
Write your post or page for the content, as thought you need to pass on information to someone who is on the other side of the planet and their only way of communicating with you is through the information you put on your website. Which in most cases is the truth.
Hone and polish your work.
Whether you are writing content for a page or a post, always write in a wordprocessor and run both spellchecker and grammar checker on your work regularly. Not all grammar checker suggestions will be relevant, however grammar checker can help you to polish your article. Don’t be in a rush to write and post your article. Spend a bit of time honing your content so that it is informative. Remember, you want to provide the other person enough information to get your point across. Also, don’t make your article so long that no one would ever finish it. Give your article a good clear conclusion. Don’t just trail off leaving your reader feeling like they have missed the point.
When you have an article that you are happy with read it out aloud to yourself. You will be surprised at how many minor mistakes you will pick up when you are reading your posts aloud. Then ask someone whose opinion you trust to proof-read your article, not just to read your writing but to read it with a critical eye, and to make suggestions that will improve your work. Consider their suggestions carefully and include any changes that improve your article.
Editing for human readability.
After you have finished your article and edited it several times, go over your work again. This time you are looking for words like “it, they, those” that you can change to more descriptive words. Change pronouns for nouns wherever you are able to and you will be on the way to improving your SEO. Be sure that the changes you make are improving the human readability of your work and not just for the sake of adding better keywords to your article. Search engines will know the difference. Never add keywords that are not relevant to your article just because you think they will improve your SEO.