How to Write Great Content for SEO

The current wisdom is that we should be writing content for our website’s visitors, and not for search engines. That great content is great, no matter what we do for SEO.  I agree with that – for the most part.

The point that that particular wisdom is missing is that search best practices, by and large, are a checklist of how to write articles that are great for web users.

Search Engine Best Practices Are Meant for Web Users

Where best practices are concerned, they are talking about making content user-friendly, meeting user intent, answering a question completely, and having the design of the site be so intuitive it doesn’t cause friction in the user’s understanding.

The title of this page is wrapped in an “H1” HTML tag, which should be used to signify the title of a page.  The bold subheading above is wrapped in “H2” which says that’s a section break, subheading, and less important than the title.  Were you, the reader, at all confused by this use of H1s and H2s on this page?  Nopity nope. In fact, it made perfect sense to you.

I tend to type in short bursts of sentences and paragraph break more often than I would in fiction or academic prose.  That’s really common for web writing, because we are using a different visual medium, and internet users tend to skim.  In fact, they skim a lot. They will jump to bold words and bullet points!

How People Really Read the Web:

  • Skim titles, things in bold
  • Read the first few sentences of the first paragraph
  • (Or the TL;DR if there is one)
  • Jump to pulled out quotes, photo captions and bulleted lists
  • If they are really interested, they might go back and read the whole thing
  • … but probably not.

Writing your content to get the maximum depth of understanding based upon people’s web skimming tactics is a great way to ensure you’ve covered all of the topics you need to cover.  Oh, and before I forget to mention it, all of these things are also on that list of best practices that your SEO person gave you.

Don’t Be Intimidated By the Word Jumble Game, Please

Google has read everyone’s content, and they have graded all the papers. They know which content includes all of the details necessary to show a complete answer to a user query.  That’s their job.

If we want to compete, then, we need to also use all of the pieces of a complete answer to a question.   Tactically, an SEO whiz can tell what words, phrases and questions should be included in an article by gazing at Search Engine Result pages, the pages of top-ranking competitors, and by brainstorming all of the things we need to know about a topic.  They then hand a list of words to a writer.

This is like the writing exercise in school where you have to fit those words into a page. It’s a creative challenge, not a constraint.  Synonyms are our friends, and we don’t need every one of them jammed on a single page.

What the word jumble does is allows us to ensure – checklist style – that we’ve answered all of the facets of the questions that people have about a topic.

But What about Keywords?

You know how we call it “rolling down the window” in the car, but we’re talking about pushing a little button. Or the meaninglessness of the “save” icon to a kid who has never seen a 3 1/2″ floppy diskette?  What about the phone receiver icon that we press on our smart phones to pick up or “hang up” a call?  Those symbolic anachronisms are about as relevant to modern SEO as the word “keyword”.

Yes, we still research volume of queries to specific topics, and make prioritization and decisions based on that.  But we don’t use a single keyword or phrase to be the end-all-be-all for the questions that web users have about a topic.  Often, you’ll here “topic” or “semantically related” ideas being bandied about in the SEO world way more than keywords.

The problem is that everyone knows that word, and just like the save icon being a relevant symbol for an obsolete technology, the word lives on.

It’s a Tool – Like a Checklist – Not a Formula

An obsolete SEO joke:

An SEO walks into a bar, tavern, pub, drinking establishment …

A more current SEO joke:

Q: How many SEOs does it take to change a lightbulb. 

A: Well,  it depends. 

Search is holistic, fluid, and really specific to each site’s industry, goals and visitors. Much of SEO is about finesse and improvisation.  The problem comes in when people still mistake it as being formulaic.  “Put this keyword here, and here, then synonym 1 goes here.”   I find that people who want to reduce search to always-do and always-don’t sorts of rules end up being frustrated by the job.  It’s always about trade-offs.

So how do you write great content for SEO?

Well, it depends. What are your visitors asking questions about?

Extreme White Hat

In a conversation with another SEO last week, my personal philosophies surrounding SEO were called “Extremely White Hat”. I really couldn’t tell from his tone of voice whether he thought that was a good thing, or a bad thing.  I had a hunch that if it showed results, he wasn’t too averse to a little smudge of dirt on his cowboy hat.

Not me.

Here’s what I said back to him, and what I stand by:

SEO is not a short-term strategy. It’s a long-term strategy.

If you want search engine traffic in the short term, you buy pay-per-click adwords.

If you want to have long-term rankings in the organic search results, you plan on it taking anywhere from six months to a year to do it the right way.  When setting goals for the business, you don’t plan on it reaching its peak potential until two years out.

Then, you don’t take any shortcuts, you don’t do anything that “might be grey” with the hopes that it will sneak past undetected. You do the work. You do it right. You make the website a good place for users and for search engines.  You create good content.

This is how you maintain rankings at the 2.5 year mark when the next Penguin update rolls out. This is how you see your traffic increase after a Panda update. This is how you can sleep well at night about doing your job well.

Yes, my hat is squeaky-clean white. That’s because I want the site I’m working on to do well three years from now as much as I want it to do well today.

 

Social Media Tip: Play before Work

This bit of advice surfaced in a discussion at an in-house SEO event I attended last weekend, and I think it merits a note. We were talking about companies selecting people to run their Social Media campaigns and what criteria they should use.  My experience at the car dealership immediately sprang to mind. I selected people who already used each platform.

The best Social Media marketers and salesmen are the ones who are already playing in the medium.

Social Media is not really one easy part of the sales / marketing funnel. It’s better used for building brand-love, and for connecting with fans and customers. Someone who has been on Twitter for a few months for their own purposes knows this. Anyone who scrolls past fan page content on their Facebook newsfeed understands that intuitively.  Casual users understand the culture and the social rules.

I’m following a bunch of authors who get this right. Who let their personalities shine through, who chat with other people. Then, sometimes (and only sometimes), they toss information out there about their books.  This is appropriate. And expected.

I’m also following a bunch of authors who get this terribly wrong. They seem to have a lot of followers, and they seem to be retweeted often, but this is deceptive. They are followed by people who follow-back automatically. They are retweeted by people who use their accounts exclusively to push their own books or retweet others.  No one is reading this. No one is responding to it. No one cares.

If you want to schedule a whole bunch of repetitive tweets that will get lost in the noise and never generate a sale. By all means, build your platform that way.

If you want to actually have fans and people who care about you and your success, it’s time to change the game.

My advice: Don’t try to sell anything – yours or anyone else’s anything – for two months.

Log in every day. Send out notes and @-replies every day. But don’t try to sell anything.  Make friends. This will help you learn how the medium works. It will let you see examples of what not to do in your own feed, because they will irritate and distract you.  It will help you intuit how to improve your own interactions.  You’ll learn the culture.

After two months, you can start selling again, but I guarantee that if you try this experiment, you will change your tactics.

Related post: Why I’ve Unfollowed You On Twitter

Data analysis and creative hunchwork

Last week someone asked me what SEO was in a tweet. 140 characters is almost short enough for me to use my cocktail party line: “It’s magic.”   I use this in a tongue in cheek way to avoid really technical conversations with drunk people. I’m quite capable of explaining SEO in simple terms.

( Here’s my real answer:  “My goal is to get targeted traffic to my website. I do that by aiming to get my website to the top of search results for certain keyword phrases. I have to know which phrases I’m going after to bring the right traffic to the site. I have to make sure my content answer the question.  The back end code needs to be honest and clear about the fact that we answer the question better than anyone else online.   It’s a combination of data analysis, understanding web architecture and design, content planning and quality content.”)

But because it was twitter – and that mouthful is no tweet  – I summed it up using the phrase “A combination of data analysis and creative hunchwork”.

Because I work in numbers and data, I understand how important it is to know which numbers are important.  Remember word problems in high school math class? Do you remember the ones that had insufficient information included to get to an answer?  How about the ones that had a whole lot of extra information to confuse you?  That’s what we’re working with in terms of metrics.

The Known

The things that I can measure – the things that I know about my nascent author platform – are all over the place. They are part of both sides of that word-problem coin.

  • How many people follow me on Twitter?
  • What’s my Klout score?
  • How many fans do I have on Facebook?
  • How many people visit my blog?
  • How many people click more pages in my blog?
  • What’s the most popular page on my blog
  • What search terms are people using to find me?
  • How many pinterest (google + etc) followers do I have?
  • What countries do my visitors come from?

Then there are the ways I measure myself and my own activities…..

  • Should I unfollow / follow people on Twitter?
  • How many blog posts have I written?
  • How often do I tweet / post on facebook / pin on pinterest?
  • How many words have I written today?
  • How many contests have I won
  • How many clips do I have
  • How many queries have I sent (rejections have I gotten)

This is just the tip of the iceberg. The list of online and offline metrics available is very, very long.

The Unknown

The next set of metrics are the things I can not measure. The things that float in the great unknown.

  • Why did those three people unfollow me on Twitter today? (WHAT DID I DO? COME BACK!)
  • How many queries will I have to send out to get a Yes?
  • How many drafts?
  • When is my “good enough” really “good enough”?
  • Why does Google show THAT photo of me when I search for my pen name?

This list, I’m afraid, is even longer than the mind-boggling list of the knowns.

Sifting the Wheat from the Chaff

I was inspired to write this post because of Jan O’Hara’s  Sexy Numbers blog post at Writers Unboxed.

Jan is 100% correct. I just want to expand upon and elucidate a few of her final points.

The fact of the matter is that you’re going to measure your progress.  If you are trying to improve or grow, you’re going to be watching numbers somewhere.  Embrace that fact, and then learn how to decode the word problem for only the information you need to solve the problem.

Here are the real tricks of the metrics trade:

  1. What is the real goal of your work? What are you actually seeking to improve?  In SEO terms, my goal is traffic, not search engine rankings. I don’t care if I rank 304, if people are clicking on my links.
  2. Determine which metrics are meaningful in obtaining that goal. Back to SEO: I track visits to see if people are finding my links, I track page views to see if they like the site when they get there. 
  3. Determine which metrics you can safely ignore.  I don’t track my rankings on search results pages, because they are clouded with personalization, diluted with lack of data due to keyword unavailable metrics and secure search, and because they don’t matter.
  4. Are there any measurements that are a means to an end? This is the tricky one, and the one that trips a lot of people up. I actually do look at ranking reports – not to track, but to focus my efforts. If I see that I’m ranking top of page 2 for a term, that term becomes a “quick win” that I can focus on for easy gains.  I don’t track these numbers – I use them.

I don’t target a real number of twitter followers. I target a ratio of who I follow against who’s following me.   This measure indicates a reach that extends beyond the immediate circle of influence. It indicates that I have something to offer.  Until I get there, I need to keep tweaking my strategy. That ratio falls in the fourth category.  In fact, because my platform project is so very new, almost all of my goals fall in the fourth category.

What do you track?  What can you stop caring about?

SEO ≠ Magic

I have a “keep calm and carry a wand” sign printed out and posted on my cubicle wall at work.   People laugh about it, and I joke back, saying “When I get tired of explaining my job, I just tell people that SEO is magic.”   One of my teammate’s mom describes her daughter’s job as “strange internet voodoo science” when her friends ask.

Unfortunately, it really does seem like magic to some people. This is a problem, because then they expect it to work like magic, too.

“If we SEO this article, then it will get traffic”

As if “SEO” is a magical dust I can sprinkle over a crappy article to mystically have it appear in the SERPs.

“How can we make SEO work better?”

By investing in quality, original content that answers the questions people are searching for online. I actually gave that answer on a call today, and the response was, “Oh. I don’t have that kind of budget.”

“We see SEO as the best source of sustainable, long-term growth.”

Um, please tell me you don’t want all of our website’s traffic to come from SEO. Because while that’s a good thing and all, we might not want to be at the mercy of the next big algo update. Perhaps we should invest a little time and effort into newletters? Visitor loyalty? Brand awareness?

“How do those things help SEO?”

:::HEADDESK:::