Whether you are looking to work as a writer, or looking to hire a writer to work for you – or even if you just want your new blog to rock – chances are, you already know that you will not get far without SEO skills. But for all the hype about it, SEO can still be pretty confusing to newcomers. We are here to tackle that!
What is SEO anyway?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is basically a somewhat fancy term for improving your website’s visibility. Striking a good combination of visibility and content quality makes sure that your pages will appear among the first few numbers of browsing results when someone searches for a related topic.
The higher your visibility to the given search engine (e.g. Google, Bing etc.), the closer you get to the top results. This is what makes SEO texts such a great way to improve your reach and expand your audience. For more information, you can also pay a visit to this web page.
What are keywords and key phrases?
To put it simply, a keyword or key phrase is that little piece of content that makes your web page stick out in a search. To put it even more simply, this is exactly what people type into their browsers’ search fields. The easiest way to determine good key phrases for your content is to put yourself in the shoes of someone who would be browsing for that information, and then use that.
You can learn more about what keywords are and how to harness them for your SEO at this link: https://moz.com/learn/seo/what-are-keywords
For example, if you wanted to find some information about what the fashion was like in the Roaring Twenties, chances are you would search for “1920s fashion”, “jazz age fashion”, or other similar phrases. These are the “keys” which you need to include in your text, as they will inform a search engine that “this content has some info on 1920s fashion.” Because of how search engines handle page content, you should strive to make these keywords and phrases as similar as possible to the average search query.
How many keywords should you be using?
As much as you possibly can without it crossing over into a text that sounds unnatural. Although you want your key phrases to appear consistently throughout the text and raise the rankings of your content, you should avoid stuffing them in to the brim. Awkwardly positioned keywords and phrases, as well as those that are repeated to tatters, will in fact inflict damage upon your website’s rankings in the search.
This phenomenon is known as “over-optimizing.” A general rule of good practice is that you should never use a given keyword more than ten times in a given piece of content.
What can you do about unnatural keywords?
Because of the specific way in which people tend to formulate their entries when searching for information online, optimal keywords can occasionally become clunky, awkward, and even sound downright ridiculous. Every now and again, you will come across a required key phrase that simply cannot be made to sound natural in a sentence, no matter how you shuffle your words around.
In these cases, it might be tempting to proclaim the key phrase impossible to integrate into your content, but stop and give it a little more thought. There are actually a couple of tricks to help you overcome that.
Using punctuation to separate an awkward key phrase into a more natural one is a classic strategy. With some few exceptions, the big search engines actually blatantly ignore most punctuation marks. This means you can freely insert them right in the middle of your required keywords and phrases without any ramifications regarding your results. The most notable examples of this are the period (full stop) and dash. You can learn more about punctuation in SEO at this link.
Another favorite strategy is using the so-called “stop words” to turn an atrocious mess of a keyword into a naturally flowing phrase that will actually make sense to your readers. “Stop words” are short functional words and phrases that search engines largely ignore. These are typically articles and prepositions, such as “the”, “of”, “a”, “an”, “in”, “on”, and so forth. They especially come in handy when the pre-defined given key phrase is blatantly ungrammatical, since these are quickly recognized as a mark of poor-quality content by the search engines.
And finally, here are a few tricks for improving your SEO writing process!
These are some of the most basic things you should know, but definitely research further and advance your knowledge of this subject. The more you know, the better you can keep up with your competition! To get an idea of how the pros go about it, check out this link: https://www.justinmonkseo.com/spokane/
Article by Vishal
Meet Vishal Gaikar, the tech wizard hailing from Pune, India, who's on a mission to decode the digital universe one blog post at a time. When he's not tinkering with gadgets or diving deep into the digital realm, you can find him concocting the perfect cup of chai or plotting his next adventure. Follow his tech escapades on Twitter and buckle up for a wild ride through the world of innovation and geekery!
