Today, search engine optimization (SEO) is a crucial part of any inbound marketing strategy. You need to optimize your content for search engines so people can find your content and engage with you. However, SEO content writing takes a lot of technical skill and creativity to get it right.
In 2022, nearly all businesses are at least somewhat familiar with SEO. You might remember the days that SEO solicitation emails filled your inbox each morning—or maybe this is still the case for you. Either way, we’re living in a digitized world more than ever before since the pandemic. This might lead you to ask what is SEO web content writing and how does it work in 2022?
Knowing the basics of SEO can certainly give your content an edge in the search engines, but the truth is that SEO knowledge alone isn’t always enough. However, knowing where to use it and how to strategically apply it is a major aspect of experiencing desirable results.
First, let’s talk about the basics of SEO that is helpful to know in terms of SEO web content writing.
What is SEO Web Content Writing? SEO 101
Knowing a bit of SEO can help your blog rank higher in the search engines. It can help you optimize your blog better with the use of various HTML tags. And above all else, SEO knowledge can help you properly implement a keyword strategy when you’re blogging for business.
Having a proper keyword strategy for your blog can make a big impact in terms of traffic flow. There are many sources that can bring in traffic to your company blog, and Google search is one of them. Your knowledge in SEO can help harness traffic into your website straight from your blog.
Lastly, SEO knowledge can help you with best practices when it comes to using your keywords. This will also ensure that you aren’t overstuffing your blog posts with those keywords, which can lead to penalties from Google.
So, overall, knowing SEO benefits you with:
- Improved search visibility
- Knowledge of the best keywords to use for your blog
- Better optimized tags
- Attracting quality links
- Achieving a strategic edge over your competitors
You can see that SEO knowledge clearly has its perks when you’re focusing on SEO web content writing. So, that leads us to our next question:
10 SEO Content Writing Basics
There are many different layers to SEO, but you don’t need to know them all to get started with SEO content writing.
When you’re looking to educate yourself on SEO when you’re blogging for business, concentrate your efforts on the following:
- Header Tags
An H1 tag is typically used as a blog or website’s title on the page. H2 and H3 tags are typically used as subheader tags on a lot of blog posts.
How can you spot header tags? The font is considerably bigger than the default font throughout the rest of the website. Insert your keywords into these H2 tags (subheaders) when it makes sense. Whatever you do, don’t force your keyword to fit into a tag if it sounds awkward.
- Permalinks
A permalink is the structure of your blog post’s URL. This is another area where you should use your primary keyword.
Say you’re a company that sells running shoes, and the keyword for your blog post is blue running shoes.
An example of a poor permalink would look like:
www.YourWebsite.com/My-Blog-Post
Instead, you would structure your permalink to look like this:
www.YourWebsite.com/10-Blue-Running-Shoes-That-Youll-Love
To make formatting easy, you can make your permalink read the same as your blog post title.
- Internal and External Linking
If you’re writing a blog post, you’ll want to be sure that you include both internal and external linking. Internal linking refers to linking to pages within your own website. External website means that you are linking to another website on the web somewhere.
The point of internal linking is to help with SEO and establish a website hierarchy.
When applicable, link to domains of high authority as a reference to any research that you do. High authority domains are websites such as news websites, educational websites (.edu), and government websites (.gov).
Referencing these websites in your blog posts will help establish credibility on your own blog. Just make sure that the citations are relevant to the research that you’re providing to your audience—citing a source just for the sake of providing a quality citation won’t help you in terms of SEO.
- Writing Anchor Text
Now that you know about internal and external linking, you’ll want to be considerate about the text contained inside the link. There are several anchor text variations that you can use with SEO content writing, including:
- Brand name
- Product name (acceptable, with subject matter)
- Keyword (acceptable only if it’s relevant to the topic)
- Link back to a specific page on the same site
- Generic text that doesn’t provide any SEO value (i.e., “click here”)
A sensible approach is to mix up the anchor text throughout your content.
- Keyword Strategy
The last important SEO element that you need to know is your best keywords. You can start blogging for business by simply incorporating 2-3 of your primary keywords throughout your blog posts. Focusing on one keyword per blog post makes it a little less complicated, and it’s the best route for beginners.
Remember that your customers don’t think the same as you do in terms of keywords. Different phases of the buying cycle can influence customers to word their search inquiries in a variety of different ways. Be sure to research your keywords before implementing a strategy.
- Optimizing for Voice Search
As you craft your content in 2022, are you keeping voice search at the top of your mind? If not, you might be missing out on long-tail keywords that will help you rank higher in search engines.
Since voice search is still in the relative infancy stage, it’s important to leverage strategies that will grow your traffic and engagement organically.
How do you optimize your content for voice search? One approach is to focus on using questions as keywords. Google’s voice search supports broad matches, phrase matching and exact matches for questions. So if you have a page about “what is SEO,” you can use questions like “what is search engine optimization.”
- Meta Descriptions
Are you familiar with meta descriptions? Most search engines use the meta description tag to describe your page. It’s a short sentence or paragraph that comes up in search engine results and is displayed in the user’s browser tab. The meta description is important because it’s one of the first things a user sees when doing a search. A good meta description can entice a user to click your link, whereas a bad meta description can drive them away.
There are several best practices to consider when it comes to writing meta descriptions, including:
- Be descriptive: Write meta descriptions that not only clearly describe your content, but that are informative, as well. Your goal is to entice the reader to click through to your site or content.
- Write meta descriptions that not only clearly describe your content, but that are informative, as well. Your goal is to entice the reader to click through to your site or content.
- Stick to 50 to 160 characters for your meta descriptions.
- Alt Tags
Alt tags are a way to describe an image to search engines. These are quite simplistic and in nature and typically contain the keyword or the title of the page/blog post.
- Formatting for a Powerful Presentation
While formatting your content isn’t a direct SEO skill, it surely helps when it comes to user experience. From subheaders to unique graphics, SEO knowledge won’t make your blog look any better. However, the use of H2 tags can help you learn to create subheaders between paragraphs, allowing for an easier reading flow.
- Educational, Value-Based Content
Another valuable element of SEO content writing is educating your readers. This means that you must deeply understand your topic and be able to adequately advise your audience with educational content. SEO can help lead your readers to an educational blog post, but it’s up to you to convey the information in a compelling way.
Putting SEO Content Writing into Practice
Now that you know the 10 SEO content writing basics, you’ll need to learn how you can put those into practice to yield the best results. Where can you use SEO content writing to enhance your overall digital media strategy?
- Blog posts: Implementing a strong blog strategy with targeted keywords can help enhance your website’s SEO.
- General website pages: Put those brochure-style pages on your website to use with SEO content writing. You can implement basic SEO components that we mentioned to help Google find your website.
- Local/geographic content: Creating local pages as a service brand can get more eyes on your business. You can optimize for keywords that relate to your service as well as your geographic location.
- White paper and case study promotion: Do you have your own white paper or case study to share? You can create a landing page for this downloadable so it’s easier for potential customers to locate.
- YouTube: Don’t forget about your YouTube channel when it comes to SEO content writing. This is the perfect place to implement keywords to rank your videos on YouTube’s search engine.
- Editing old blog posts: Did you know that you can edit old blog posts with new keywords? This can be extremely useful for getting more search engine traffic to your content. You can edit your previous posts and change your existing content so that it appears in more relevant searches.
These are just a few examples of where you can put your SEO content writing into practice. We offer all the aforementioned services, helping you to optimize your content from top to bottom. If you’re interested in SEO content writing services, please contact us and inquire about your project.
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