The purpose and practice of writing successful SEO articles
I was so excited to read your post! Google icon Matt Cutts was blogging on August 21 and he hit the spot (as he does quite often). The title of the post was “SEO Tip: Writing Helpful Articles That Readers Will Love.” That, in itself, says it all. Why is this post so exciting? Because it reinforces what I have been saying for years. Whether you are writing content for a website, article, or any type of SEO copy, you need to think about the reader first.
There are a lot of worthless articles floating around the net these days. Useless and keyword-heavy rambling that was obviously written with the sole intention of trying to rank high. Striving to rank highly is not a bad thing, but the purpose of writing SEO articles is three-fold, not one-way: providing information, ranking high when used on your site, and increasing link popularity. That means practice must follow purpose.
Why write an article?
Let’s start from the beginning. Why write articles to get started? While having SEO content on your site is a good thing, your first concern should be offering useful information to your readers. Cutts agrees with this practice and emphasizes discussing why providing relevant and useful information is vital.
If the information is not useful, visitors to your site will have little interest in reading it. Yes, if the page is featured prominently, it could generate a bit of traffic. But if visitors take a look at your article and then click, what use have high rankings done for you?
Similarly, if you choose to distribute your article over the Internet, it is highly unlikely that others will choose to publish your article on their sites. If your work does not provide solid information and is poorly written, it will not be considered worthy of a link.
Optimization for engines
Once you’ve decided what information you want to provide, you can focus on SEO. Copywriting for engines requires balance. You never want to sacrifice reader experience for the sake of ratings. Entering keywords in text is a method that will almost always backfire. Virtually no one wants to read an article (or web page) that constantly repeats the exact same terms to the point of extremes.
Cutts also addressed this issue in his blog post, stating that he included key phrases within his own article and also used similar terms. Cutts made a point of suggesting that we pay more attention to using key phrases (and using variations of those key phrases) than focusing on keyword density.
The two most important keys
The two “meta-issues” that Cutts highlighted in his article were related to user experience, not the practice of SEO copywriting. First, pay attention to the content it offers. Always impart useful and concrete insights to your reader. Second, study your niche (aka your target audience) and write specifically for the purpose of helping them.
There is other great information included in Cutts’ post, and I encourage you to read it further in the comments that follow. You can find it here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-writing-useful-articles-that-readers-will-love.
These are things that I (and other SEO professionals) have been preaching for years. First the user, then the search engines. When you get the priority directly, the rest will line up without much hassle.
© 2006
