An Introduction to SEO Writing

So as I alluded to in the last lesson, one of the purposes of web writing is SEO. That is to say that we’re trying to get Google to identify a website and to show it to people who are searching for relevant terms. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which basically means trying to get to the top of Google.

We start off by identifying key phrases or keywords that we want people to use when they’re finding our website. So, for instance, if you sell hats online, then a good search term might be “buy hats online.” Likewise, if you have a blog about fitness, then you might want to target the search term “fitness tips,” something like that.

Only these terms are going to be highly competitive. And you want to find that sweet spot between terms that people are searching for in high volumes but that are not too competitive. There’s not too many other people trying to get that same term. That way, you stand a chance of getting to the top, but it’s not going to be too competitive.

So instead of trying to rank for “online dating” you might try and rank for “online Christian dating in Santa Monica,” something like that. This is more niche. It’s easier to rank for. You can use tools like Google’s Keyword tool or Google Trends in order to see what people are searching for and then to consider those for your search terms.

From there, once you know what your search term is, the goal is to try and insert that search term, that keyword subtlely into your content. Now, there was a time when you could just stuff as many keywords as you liked into your writing, so that every other word would be “buy hats online,” but that was illegible. And pretty soon, Google cottoned on, and it stamped down on this practice. If you get caught doing that now, it looks spammy, and your site will be penalized, possibly removed from Google altogether, de-indexed.

We don’t want that. So we need to include our search terms subtlely, in a way that isn’t jarring for the reader. Generally, that means sticking to a density of around 0.5% to 2%. So for every 100 words, you might include one keyword, maybe two or maybe once every 200 words.

It also matters where you include those keywords because Google gives special priority to certain positions within your content. So if it’s in the first paragraph, for instance, that’s going to have more value than the keyword repeated further down. The same goes the last paragraph, and any H1, H2, H3 headers throughout your text. We can also lace our keywords into alt tags and meta tags, but that’s for the developers to worry about.

Also useful to remember is that Google’s moving towards a more AI-based algorithm. And so you want to try and use long-tail natural keywords. You want to right around the topic. You want to use synonyms. You want to use related terms. This is called LSI, or latent semantic indexing. So the more obviously you’re writing about your topic, the better, but without putting off your reader.

And serving the reader should always come first. If you really want to stuff a keyword into that first paragraph, but it just doesn’t work in the context of what you’ve written, then leave it out. Don’t stuff it in at the expense of better content. That’s not what Google wants, and ultimately, that’s not what your readers want either. It’s better to have good quality traffic than traffic for traffic’s sake.