When it comes to tactics and strategies to improve search engine results, there’s really nothing more important than the content on your website. Content, after all, is what the search engines analyze to determine the validity of a webpage and website. For this very reason, many webmasters focus their content efforts with the search engines in mind.
However focusing entirely on your search engine results is a mistake because search engines don’t buy your products or services, they don’t click on your ads and affiliate links and they don’t contribute directly to your bottom line – customers do.
This is why it’s essential that you write your content for your audience first and the search engines second. This, however, presents a conundrum because sometimes it’s difficult to combine the two. Keywords don’t always fit into an article or blog post naturally.
Here are three steps to write your SEO content and still sound natural.
Step One
Research your keywords and keyword phrases. Choose one to focus on in your article and then set it aside.
Step Two
Write your content, keeping your main keyword topic in mind, without even thinking about keywords and keyword phrases. For example, if your keyword phrase is, “How to housetrain a puppy,” then you’ll write an article about how to housetrain a puppy however as you’re writing it, you’re not worrying about if you’re using the keyword phrase or not. Your entire focus is on writing a quality article for your audience.
Step Three
Working in your keywords. Once your article or blog post has been written, then it’s time to go back with your keyword at the ready. Read through your article and insert this keyword or keyword phrase where it seems to fit naturally. Keep in mind the fact that search engines are also looking for relevant words so if you’re writing about puppy housebreaking, you can also use housetraining and potty training occasionally to break up the monotony and help the search engines recognize the relevance of your article.
When inserting your primary keyword or keyword phrase keep in mind the places the search engine spiders are going to look.
- Your headline
- Your subheadings
- Your first paragraph
- Your last paragraph
- In the body of the article
When using your keywords aim for a density of about three to seven percent. Anymore and search engines might recognize your content as being keyword stuffed. To determine percentage simply take the number of times you use your keyword and divide it by the total words. Therefore, if you have a 450 word article and you use your keyword 18 times you have a keyword density of four percent.
Once you’ve completed your article, read it aloud to see if it sounds natural. This is one of the best ways to evaluate it. Remember to keep your audience in mind first and the search engines second – this strategy will always pay off.
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Thanks Julia,this all makes sense and I follow most of the steps although, after making some notes, I do consider my title before starting to write the post. This sometimes serves to stop me diverting onto something not totally relevant, at which point I will take out these bits and sometimes use this to write a follow up post.
The first paragraph is usually OK because I talk about the article content.
At the end I use Yoast SEO to check to see if I need to make any changes and I will then tweak some headings and make sure my keyword appears enough but not too much.