So you want to be an SEO writer?
To get there, you’ll need to really understand what SEO is. You’ll need to ‘get’ how it can be a complete game changer for companies and the media they are putting online. You’ll need to learn SEO strategies and implement them into your writing, without being spammy. And you’ll need to understand SERPs. Let’s take a closer look at what being an SEO content writer involves.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimisation, and it is essentially a series of rules that help companies make sure their website pages achieve high rankings in search results. Without SEO, landing pages, articles, and blogs, would just get lost in the ether.
When a webpage follows SEO guidelines, it is much more likely to bring more traffic to the website. People searching for services, answers, or even the news, are unlikely to scroll much further than the first few suggestions on their search engine. In fact, studies have shown that the top search result on Google will receive 31.7% of the clicks, and the top three will share 75.1% of the clicks.
Anything below those top three will still get traffic, of course, but not the most traffic possible. And nobody wants that! By understanding and implementing SEO tactics, businesses, and content creators can ensure that their web pages earn a place in those top few spots.
How does SEO work?
It’s impossible to correctly use SEO on web pages without first understanding how it works. Once you know what it is you’re doing and why you’re doing it, SEO becomes much easier to understand.
The first thing you need to know is that every search engine has crawlers, sometimes called spiders, which spread out across the internet to find new web pages. When they find new web pages, they are added to the search engine’s index. Then, when someone searches for something, the search engine will check its index and provide the most relevant web pages, ordered in accordance with their deemed relevancy. Much like asking a librarian for the index cards for the section that has books on the subject you want.
SEO works by increasing the relevancy of your web page. It targets specific keywords and phrases, links, and alt texts to ensure that crawlers can accurately work out what your web page is about. But that’s not to say that your web pages should just be full of random keywords and hyperlinks left, right, and centre. In fact, SEO works best when you try to understand what your audience is searching for, and then try to satisfy those needs with your page.
The basics of being an SEO content writer
In order to effectively implement SEO tactics as a business or a writer, you will need to do some SEO training. This will help you to really grasp the importance of SEO, as well as learn all of the key skills you need to maintain a good SEO strategy. For now, though, let’s take a look at the basics of SEO management. The key elements for an SEO writer are:
Crawlability
Like we said, Google and other search engines will crawl and index your web page. If the crawlers find your webpage to be difficult to crawl, perhaps because your sitemap is faulty, or there are no internal links, then they will not be able to report all of your web pages to the index.
If you’re not in the index, you are not going to come up on the SERP (search engine result page). This can be a catastrophe regarding traffic, but fortunately, it is often easy to solve.
High quality content
Content is king! Crawlers prefer it when your webpage has a strong standard of content. This means avoiding automatically generated content, or duplicate content, as well as content that has very little substance or is just full of unnecessary key words. And the internal links to the page as mentioned above. After all, if your website doesn’t link to the page you have written, why should the search engine offer it in results? You clearly don’t think it is important enough to link to.
In some cases, pages cannot help but be ‘low-quality’, when they’re doorway pages or pages that exist for a very specific purpose. Generally, though, it is best to use few of these and to focus on high-quality pages and content.
Keyword research and using keywords
When crawling your page, search engines need to be able to determine what it is your web page is talking about. To do so, they need to be able to pick up some keywords. Too many people take this to mean that they should stuff their pages full of keywords – that’s not the case.
The best way to use keywords is to do plenty of research into what your audience is looking for. This is called keyword research. You can then use these keywords to shape your content strategy, using them sparingly in your title, heading, and meta description. And then a spattering throughout the copy. This ensures that crawlers know what your page is all about without thinking it is spam.
Backlinks
Unlike the first two SEO elements, this is not something that you can add to your web page. It is known, for that reason, as an off-page SEO element.
Having backlinks can be greatly beneficial to your website, but they can be hard to build. Backlinks are links from other websites to yours, and they can really help to improve where you rank. Search engines will look at how many backlinks you have and where they are coming from. Backlinks from high-authority websites are worth more than spam or low-authority websites. But beware! There are lots of companies out there promising tons of backlinks for a price. Avoid these. Search engines will be able to differentiate between these and genuine backlinks from relevant sites.
How to make your first step with SEO
The key takeaway from this blog is that if you want to become an SEO writer or specialist, you need to really understand the following:
- SEO
- Keywords
- Backlinking
- SERPs
- SEO strategy
- And more
If you’ve never worked on SEO before, setting up an SEO strategy can be daunting. But don’t panic. There are plenty of ways to slowly introduce yourself to it, like SEO training, or hiring an SEO specialist like us here at POSH. To get you started, here’s our Key to SEO Success.
