Bloggers Need to Be Aware of SEO While Writing Content

SEO While Writing Content
Bloggers, especially personal bloggers, like to pretend that they’re immune to the classic editing guidelines that other writing genres must pay strict homage to. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. If anything, blogs must be edited twice over at least. The first for the human readers who will hopefully be spending their valuable time on the written words, and secondly for the search engines that decide the fate of websites by ranking them in SERPs that can be millions of pages deep. Assuming you want people to read your writing (and why else would you be publishing it to the internet?), you need to take into account SEO while generating content – especially if you’re link building.

Machines Can Read
Some blogs can have a huge influence while throwing grammar and style to the wind (see Hyperboly and a Half) but these are the exception, not the rule. Your content needs to be easy to read – don’t try to mimic John Locke – by people and software. That’s right, it’s not a science fiction movie starring Will Smith, machines and software can actually read. Google’s crawlers that feed its all-important algorithm information can actually tell if a sentence is structured correctly, if words are spelled right, and even if the proper syntax is being used. Take the time to re-read your work to catch any errors that make your writing difficult to read. If you can, have someone else read the content as well before it goes live. Avoid using “lingo” or vernacular if possible. If you have to explain what a word means to someone in real life, then a web crawler probably won’t know it either. Of course, every niche has its particular lingo and these are fine to use – just don’t go making up words.

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Always Use Moderation with Keywords
A lot of bloggers hear that they’re supposed to use keywords and doing so will help their pages rank. This is true, but too much of a good thing can make you sick… or get your pages penalized. Don’t cram keywords into your content like they’re plugs and you’re in a leaky raft. Keywords won’t save a broken site, but they can help a decent site. Make sure they fit in naturally and read well. Speak the content out loud. Does it sound spammy and unnatural? If yes, you need to change it up. Just make sure you have keywords featured in the content regularly and naturally and you should be alright, don’t stress over them.

• Being aware of keywords becomes even more important if you are guest posting and building links back to your blog. Your anchor text should reflect the keywords found on your site, but you shouldn’t overdo exact match anchor text since it looks artificial to search engines.

Format for Quick Reading
Writers, as a rule, tend to get long winded and think that people will flock to read every crafted syllable. Don’t be delusional, this isn’t going to happen unless you’re being featured in an industry leading feature. For now, make sure that the meat of your articles is easy to find and digest. Use subheadings, bullet points, italics, bold font, numbering, or anything to help make your writing scan able. Of course use this where it fits. If you’re writing a literary blog then you probably don’t want people to scan, but you can still implement good formatting practices to make the page more presentable.

Learn to Attribute Pictures Correctly
Pictures can be a huge source of traffic, but they have to be labeled and cataloged correctly for them to be useful. Optimizing photos with in depth descriptions, keyword relevant alt text, captions, and hosting the photo to your own site greatly improve the amount of traffic they’re able to point towards your site. For more information check out this post on SEOmoz about the importance of optimizing photos.
Optimizing a blog for SEO is important and doesn’t need to be hard. Themes through WordPress and competitors offer plenty of tools to help optimize the pages, and following these tips should help your content rank better as well.

Thomas McMahon is a writer for Page One Power, a relevancy first link building company who serves an ever growing clientele. When Thomas isn’t writing, you can find him composing music unfit for human ears.
Thomas McMahon is a writer for Page One Power, a relevancy first link building company who serves an ever growing clientele. When Thomas isn’t writing, you can find him composing music unfit for human ears.