So, how can you, as a content writer, create search engine friendly content that is also engaging?

Redundancy: Avoid repeating sentences. Whatever you depict in the first paragraph shouldn’t recur in the paragraphs that follow even if you are writing on an interesting topic. Redundancy can only annoy the readers and drive them away. Be precise. Precision makes it easier for the visitors to memorize what they have read in your site.

Precision: Sometimes content writers tend to stretch a sentence unnecessarily just for the sake of increasing word count. Try to make it short and crisp. If you can describe it in one word use it instead of an elaborate sentence.

Organization: Organizing paragraph and structuring sentences are very important. The combination of simple and grammatically correct sentences and smaller paragraphs projecting a single idea proved to be very effective in web content writing.

Figures of Speech: Using figure of speech might add a new degree to your content. But do not overuse it. While writing web content one should keep it in mind that you are describing a service/product in a way to compel your readers to buy the service/product. And your write up is not going to be archived as a literary piece. Even though web content writing is a creative job focusing on the practical side would help.

Mood: The way you write sets the mood for the readers. It is wise to be suggestive than writing in a commanding note. Touch of subtle humor will nevertheless make your write up even more interesting and acceptable.

Keywords: To make your content search engine friendly you need to maintain proper density of keywords, usually 2 to 3 percent, in the content. The title that is to be used in H1 heading plays a very important role.  Make sure your title contains the main keyword/key phrase.

However, following tips and tricks for better writing can help you to some extent. But there is no alternative to reading.  Just as you like to read good books reading others’ works will help you improve.

Effective SEO Copywriting

Writing compelling content is the mantra of SEO copywriting. It takes a lot to write content that appeal to both human visitors as well as search engine bots. For the copywriting part, you can improve your vocabulary and make sure your grammar is correct. And a good share of reading can help you enhance your writing style as well. But what’s the point if no one reads your stuff?

Here are a few points to improve the ‘SEO’ part in ‘SEO Copywriting’ so that your content ranks well and you get targeted traffic to your web-page:

Know your target audience. You are writing for a particular group of people whom you offer your services/products through your content. Carry a research on your prospective customers to understand their requirement and help you meet their expectations.

Study on your target market. If it is UK people you are targeting follow UK English. Otherwise, US English is all right for the global target market.

Backlinks are vital. They add value to your page in terms of search engines. With increasing popularity of social media networking sites content sharing is much easier. The social media platforms helps you get good natural links back to your site which is very important in terms of search engines optimization.

Keywords are important to notify search engines what you want your content to rank for on the SERPs. Proper distribution and placement of keywords throughout the content is necessary.

Unfortunately, some content writers often mix up SEO with copywriting and the outcome is a content stuffed with keywords. There is another lot who are eager to  chop off the ‘SEO’ from ‘Copywriting’. They fear focusing on SEO may degrade the quality of writing. But a good SEO copywriter knows how to balance both in their writing in order to generate ‘compelling’ content.

You can upload your videos and you can “Embed” them in your blog-posts, Hub- pages, lens … practically anywhere.

Now the question comes, which will you choose…?

To get to the bottom of this debate…we need to understand so as to why we really post Video in our sites, blogs..or whatever…because adding a “Relevant” video which is in tandem with your Post, site content you are actually guarantying that the visitor will stay for a certain time frame. So you will choose a Video host such that it will not “steal” away your precious visitors away from you.

YOUTUBE

It is the Top and the first Video hosting service. Practically it is the De-Facto service that will each use when they need a video service. The YouTube service has some Pros and cons to ponder.

Pros

1. Huge Upload size…1GB HD uploading
2. Huge Community
3. More expected exposure

Cons

1. Doesn’t look Cool
2. Cannot White label..at any stage
3. Viewers, and visitors get Distracted easily
4. 10 Minute Video Limit

Vimeo Service

Pros

1. Good Quality Videos
2. Clean, professional Looks
3. No distraction, Only your Video is shown

Cons

1. You are allowed to Upload Only One HD video per week in a Free Account
2. It has an Imposed 500MB limit to Free Account
3. Expected Less Exposure, the community is growing, but slowly
4. There is an Upgrade option, and if you run out of quota, you can buy extra.

The only thing that hurts while YouTube is that they show the users Related Videos with some videos with spot light too. And the video quality is not so clear as Vimeo. Though the Vimeo Community is relatively young with respect to YouTube, but it is a better option if you are ok with a paid Service.

It is the reader who goes through the website content and then buys the product or service you are selling. So write for them, address their requirements and make the content presentable and informative so that they find it appealing and helpful.

Few suggestions to make your content useful for visitors and crawlable for search engines as well:

1] Divide the content into different headings and sub headings.

2] Use <h1></h1>tag to define the heading.

3] Use <h2></h2>, <h3></h3> and so on to define the sub-headings.

4] Keep the paragraphs short – long paragraphs are difficult to read.

5] Keep the sentences short. Simple and short sentences are easy to read online.

6] If you are using images on the page, make sure the image has proper alt attribute and title attribute. This will help people understand the content of the page even when the image does not load.

7] If you are using video or audio files on the website, have a transcript available. Readers who are physically challenged will find it helpful indeed.

8] Use readable font size and font color.

9] Make sure you are using a soothing color combination. Font color should match with the background color.

10] Link to other pages of your website where relevant information is available. Interlinking is good for search engines and useful for readers too.

11] Make sure the page content has the terms that your readers may use to search the service or product that you offer.

If you want to add something more to this list; feel free comment. Let’s build up the best content writing guideline here.

LSI or the Latent Semantic Indexing technique is a more human way rather than a mechanical one to optimize web content for Google search engine rank. Unlike the conventional SEO technique, LSI, alternatively termed as LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis), takes mathematical approach for semantic analysis. With Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) method to recognize the correlation between the expressions in a collection of text, LSI can spot and associate the semantically related words sprinkled in the content.

Simply because of mathematics LSI has several advantages over the traditional SEO techniques. Some of these are:

• LSI is language independent.
• It can process any character string as well as object that can be represented in form of text.
• LSI is adaptive to new changes. It automatically upgrades itself to new changes in vocabulary and linguistic expressions while showing flexibility to spelling and typing errors in the content.
• Just as paragraphs and sentences LSI can equally optimize other text forms like lists and emails.
• LSI plays vital role in automatic document categorization. When it comes to categorizing documents and text LSI follows similar process like that of human brain.
• Grouping of documents based on their conceptual resemblance is also possible with LSI.

So far the conventional approach to search engine optimization entails use of keywords in a certain percentage of the total word count of the content. This technique sometimes degrades the standard of writing with webmasters stuffing the main keywords everywhere in their writing.

This is where LSI plays a crucial role. Using the main key phrase and some related keywords craftily in the piece once or twice ensure more readership rather than writing for the sake of writing content only. After all, a good content is what matters in the end.