SEO copywriting has traditionally been about optimizing web page copy by targeting keyword phrases in certain frequencies and densities. But search engine research shows that almost 85% of the factors that determine how a web page is ranked in a search engine is based on things that happen outside of your website. Therefore, rather than getting caught up in technical factors focus on creating compelling content others will want to link to.
While keyword research is still crucial, search engine algorithms have clearly evolved. Google treats the trust and authority of your domain, what others think about your content, and the words they use to describe it in links as an important indication of quality and relevance.
Thanks to blogging and social media platforms, more people than ever are able to cast their vote on what’s relevant by linking to it, bookmarking it, and tweeting it. Modern SEO is all about crafting content so compelling that other people want to promote it by linking to it or sharing it, which increases your trust and authority and helps the pages you want to rank well for certain keywords.
Developing quality content, that is SEO friendly and that offers quality information to your readers, requires a few basic best practices.
Organise your content in logical groups
SEO is a battle of both quality and quantity. Only one article will not get you too much traffic on its own. Articles that target high competitive keywords must be supported by related content that targets derived long tail keywords.
Watch news trends
This is really big because when a news reaches a high volume of articles, searches, lots of tweets and so on, Google will enable their ranking algorithm that is different from the classic ranking algorithm basically because it favorites fresh content that speaks about the rising news.
Have small lists of targeted keywords
Each group of articles that you’re planning should have a small list of related keywords behind it. This list will contain the main, high competitive keyword and derived/related keywords. This step is necessary, in order to develop articles that target keywords with at least few monthly searches. Many words can be related to your topic but it’s important to choose the ones that are being searched.
Optimise for long tail keywords
Long tail keywords play a crucial role. The reason is because ranking for long tail keywords depends more on how well optimized your content is rather than external factors. All the good rankings on long tail keywords will improve the exposure of the article that targets the high competitive keyword and will also flow some link-authority to it.
Plan how you’ll link between your articles
Internal linking is extremely important not only for SEO but for improving user experience also. Because articles that target long tail keywords rank easier it’s more probably to attract incoming links. If then you link from these articles to the one that targets a more competitive term then some of the link-juice will also flow to that article.
Come up with original and compelling titles
Titles are the most important factor of users clicking your articles. In terms of SEO, I think that titles play one of lead roles. A good title will contain your keywords for that article but also will have something that will trigger the curiosity or interest of readers.
Make sure you’re being crawled and indexed!
Plan how you’ll distribute your content
The Internet is like a big playground and if you want others to see your contnet you’ll have to be found where the big attractions are. This means that you’ll have to identify what social networks host discussions on topics related to your business.
Link internally in a natural way
Internal links should be made in a natural way. This means to have descriptive anchor text (not the obsolete “click here” text) placed inside sentences. Don’t abuse this and link all your pages to your main page. Also, don’t link repeatably with the same keyword: diversify, use singular or plurals, synonyms, related terms. Link between topic-related pages, this way you’ll maximize your SEO efforts through what is known as “content silos”.