SEO Content Optimization: How To Write For Search Engines and Readers

Ensuring your content is aligned with the topic and keyword phrases your audience is looking for is essential to SEO. Many will suggest other things, such as links, are important. These people are not wrong, but they do tend to underestimate the importance of aligning your content in the mix. 

At play is also a balance between how much are you writing for search engines and how much are you writing for users. Because search engines are not perfect estimators of the applicability of a web page to the audience, this will always be a factor that you're going to have to deal with. To what extent do you write for the search engines and to what extent do you write for users? Is there a way to write for both without sacrificing quality?

Write What You Know About

Traditionally for SEO content optimization you would pick a keyword or keyword phrase you are using and write your content around it, using that keyword phrase a few times but not too often that it would be considered spam. Quite where the boundary of spam is has always been vague. For computers this is difficult to set, but as humans we can get a view for it.

This gave rise to E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness . This is used, for example, by human assessors at search engines to check a page. In recent years it has been picked up as the standard of what you should be working to as if this is what search engine algorithms judge. But like when is "spam" actually spam, these things are difficult for algorithms to judge (with the possible exception of Authoritativeness which can be done on links). If you think about it both "Expertise" and "Trustworthiness" aren't something that can even be judged by humans. Expertise is really only judgeable if you are also an expert in the same topic and there are countless examples of large organizations that appear trustworthy that turned out not to be.

Whilst the extent to which search engines use E-E-A-T is therefore questionable, it should be pointed out that they are a great way to make pages for users. It's therefore important not to ignore this but to use it as a set of guiding principles. If your articles can show experience, expertise, for example, then you are likely to gain authoritativeness in the form of people linking to you. Arguably we could simplify this to the author should be an expert in the topic, or write about what you know about.

A natural extension of that is that unless you have vast amounts of Authoritativeness (links) then your site should be focused on a topic, preferably as tightly as possible. You need to cover a variety of areas in your topic or your site isn't going to be interesting for users (and we want them to read your blog post or article and click onto another one) but you want to steer clear of things that are outliers if you aren't heavily linked yet, there'll be time for that later.

Keyword Phrases

Still in these times there's a lot of talk about people targeting some or other keyword phrase for a web page. But times have moved on. It's not entirely wrong but it's not the correct way to do it. With the topic of the article being more important, it's unlikely that repeating a keyword or phrase works anywhere near as well as some people seem to think. Traditionally many tools, always with inaccurate estimates, will encourage you to do through the keyword phrase that brings the most traffic in comparison to an estimate of competition and how many links your site has. You would then use these.

This we would suggest is a mistake as it is writing for the search engines. Your first step should be to define your audience. Who are they? Why are they interested in reading this article or blog post? What keywords and phrases are these specific people likely to search for if they are interested in learning about the topic of the article? Pick a handful of the best keywords, some shorter and some long-tail and use all of these. Why? Your aim isn't to simply attract visitors but those interested in the topic you're writing about. Because these keyword phrases are topically close, you're helping the search engines to know what the page is about to send the correct audience, but the focus of your writing is still entirely for that audience. Double win! The only disadvantage is that you're not really going to have on of those highly inaccurate traffic estimates.

Structure and Style

It goes without saying that your article and blog post should be structured well and easy to read. This means using appropriate headings, something that both helps search engines and your audience. But it also means using appropriate language for the topic. Trying to sound overly clever is going to make it difficult for your audience to understand and for each engines to determine what it's about.

Easy!

That's it. It's that easy. The key to writing for search engines without sacrificing quality is to have an expert in the topic writing the text. The article or blog post should fit with others on the website, complementing them. It should focus on a particular, defined, audience and use a handful of phrases that they are likely to search for in the text. It should be well laid out and readable, and use language that is appropriate to the intended audience. If you do those things, you can't help but have content that is optimized for both search engines and visitors!