Writing SEO Content for Search Engines

SEO Content no longer means scattering keywords like Hansel and Gretel throwing breadcrumbs. The newest SEO search engines scan pages almost as your readers might. Jakob Nielsen, a researcher and expert in human-machine interaction at the Technical University of Copenhagen, found that almost 80 percent of a web site's visitors scanned the page rather than reading it line by line. They spent their first fractions of a second on the page deciding if it was worth their time. Search engine programmers still use this research to devise algorithms that provide more organic and meaningful rankings. 

Good SEO content has three primary characteristics

What is good content? find the answer you want your site must deliver value to its visitors and do it in an engaging way. Few sites specialize in a subject so narrow that they have an information niche all to themselves. You'll have competition. Set yourself apart from it with expert interviews, meaningful lists and well-researched resources. Write well or invest in someone who does; your investment will pay off in increased traffic. 

 Although search engines aren't your primary audience, they still influence your page rankings. In the days of early SEO, using keyword-stuffed META tags brought in plenty of traffic. People didn't hang around on a site that promised low air fares and delivered advertisements, but that didn't affect the search engines. Each iteration of the engines' algorithms got better at discerning valuable sites from clutter, though, so site creators had to sharpen their technique as well. Instead of META tags, they used keywords sprinkled throughout an article.

Content Is King all over

If you write some thing you must write a way easy and easy thinking. If you were writing SEO text solely for machines, optimization would be simple. Sprinkle in some keywords, rearrange them at random and watch the hit counter skyrocket. Sometimes SEO copy writers forget that this isn't the case. Real people read your text and they expect something in return for the time and attention they give you. They expect good content, and their expectations have shaped how search engines rank your site.

What is Anchor Text

Anchor text a link incorporates a keyword into the text of the hyperlink, we call this anchor text. A link's anchor text may be one of the most powerful resources a webmaster has. Backlinks from multiple websites with the anchor text "orphaned dogs" would help your website rank higher for the keyword "orphaned dogs". Using your keyword is a superior way to utilize a hyperlink as against having links with words like "click here" which do not relate to your website. The 'Backlink Anchor Text Analysis Tool' is a tool which will assist you find your backlinks and the text which is being used to link to your website.

Why Backlinks Are Important

Inbound and outbound backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines like Google, give more credit to websites that have a large number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.

Therefore, when search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a keyword, they not only consider the number of backlinks to that site but also their quality. In order to determine the quality, a search engine considers the content of the sites. When backlinks to your site come from other sites, and those sites have content related to your site, these backlinks are considered more relevant to your site. If backlinks are found on sites with unrelated content, they are considered less relevant. The higher the relevance of backlinks, the greater their quality.

What are Backlinks?

Have two types of links: inbound and outbound. Outbound links start from your site and lead to an external site, while inbound links or backlinks, come from an external site to yours. e.g. if cnn.com links to yourdomain.com, the link from cnn.com is a backlink (inbound) for yourdomain.com, however the link is an outbound link from perspective. Backlinks are among the main building blocks to good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Keywords in Page Titles

The page title is another special place because the contents of the <title> tag usually gets displayed in most search engines, (including Google). While it is not mandatory per the HTML specification to write something in the <title> tag (i.e. you can leave it empty and the title bar of the browser will read “Untitled Document” or similar), for SEO purposes you may not want to leave the <title> tag empty; instead, you'd better write the the page title in it.

Unlike URLs, with page titles you can get wordy. If we go on with the dog example, the <title> tag of the home page for the http://Mysteriousall. can include something like this: <title>Save world – Save a Life and Bring Joy to Your Home</title>, <title>Everything You Need to Know About save world</title> or even longer.

Keywords in URLs and File Names

The Web site name and the whole URL of a site tell a lot about it. The presumption is that if your site is about Mysterious, you will have “Mysterious” as part of your domain name. For instance, if your site is mainly about adopting Mysterious, it is much better to name your Mysteriousal site “Mysteriousall.com” than “Mysteriousworld.com”, for example, because in the first case you have two major keywords in the URL, while in the second one you have no more than one potential minor keyword. 

Keywords in Special Places in the URL

Keywords are very important not only as quantity but as quality as well – i.e. if you have more keywords in the page title, the headings, the first paragraphs – this counts more that if you have many keywords at the bottom of the page.

The reason is that the URL (and especially the domain name), file names and directory names, the page title, the headings for the separate sections are more important than ordinary text on the page and therefore, all equal, if you have the same keyword density as your competitors but you have keywords in the URL, this will boost your ranking incredibly, especially with Yahoo!.

The Keyword Density Checker

After you have chosen the keywords that describe your site and are supposedly of interest to your users, the next step is to make your site keyword-rich and to have good keyword density for your target keywords. Keyword density although no longer a very important factor in SEO is a common measure of how relevant a page is. 

Generally, the idea is that the higher the keyword density, the more relevant to the search string a page is. The recommended density is 3-7% for the major 2 or 3 keywords and 1-2% for minor keywords. Try the Keyword Density Checker below to determine the keyword density of your website.

Select the Right Keywords to Optimization

A one-word search string is centuries ago. Now, when the Web is so densely populated with sites, it is next to impossible to achieve constant top ratings for a one-word search string. Achieving constant top ratings for two-word or three-word search strings is a more realistic goal.

 For instance, If you have a site about dogs, do NOT try and optimize for the keyword "dog" or "dogs". Instead you could try and focus on keywords like "dog obedience training", "small dog breeds", "homemade dog food", "dog food recipes" etc. Success for very popular one-two word keywords is very difficult and often not worth the trouble, it's best to focus on less competitive highly specific keywords.

Keywords – the Most Important Item in SEO element

Keywords are the most important SEO element for every search engine, they are what search strings are matched against. Choosing the right keywords to optimize for is thus the first and most crucial step to a successful SEO campaign. If you fail on this very first step, the road ahead is very bumpy and most likely you will only waste your time and money. 

There are many ways to determine which keywords to optimize for and usually the final list of them is made after a careful analysis of what the online population is searching for, which keywords have your competitors chosen and above all - which are the keywords that you feel describe your site best.

The Major Search Engines

Although the basic principle of operation of all search engines is the same, the minor differences between them lead to major changes in results relevancy. For different search engines different factors are important. There were times, when SEO experts joked that the algorithms of Bing are intentionally made just the opposite of those of Google.

While this might have a grain of truth, it is a matter a fact that the major search engines like different stuff and if you plan to conquer more than one of them, you need to optimize carefully. 

How to work Search Engines

Search Engines-The first basic truth you need to know to learn SEO is that search engines are not humans. While this might be obvious for everybody, the differences between how humans and search engines view web pages aren't. Unlike humans, search engines are text-driven. Although technology advances rapidly, search engines are far from intelligent creatures that can feel the beauty of a cool design or enjoy the sounds and movement in movies. Instead, search engines crawl the Web, looking at particular site items (mainly text) to get an idea what a site is about.

This brief explanation is not the most precise because as we will see next, search engines perform several activities in order to deliver search results – crawling, indexing, processing, calculating relevancy, and retrieving.