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A Look at SEO Writing

SEO Writing – How Familiar

SEO writing is something that you may have heard of already. When we start writing content for a website and we look for tips that can help us gather more traffic through our content, SEO always shows up. But what really is SEO and how can we write content so that it can really achieve the purposes of SEO, which is to lift a website into the search engine rankings and make the website more visible to the wide Internet public?

Keyword Research

Keywords are the heart of SEO writing. Keywords are words or phrases related to your intended website content. These keywords are also the words that Web users are very likely to enter when they begin searching for information related to the topic of your website. For example, you have a website for selling power tools. Relevant keywords include “power tools”, “buy power tools”, “power tools for sale”, “buy power tools for sale”, “power tools shop”, “shop power tools”, and many more. The SEO writer should include these keywords in the write-ups and articles they’ll be posting in their website. When a Web user types any of these keywords in the search engine, this individual’s website will now show up higher in the results page. Showing up in page 1 of the search engine results page is a must – less than 1% of users go beyond page 1 when inspecting search engine results.

Local SEO

Keyword research may be good, but there's more to be done. Let's go back to the power tools website we are talking about. Remember – that power tools website is competing with other power tools websites all over the world. Many of these websites also underwent SEO refinements, so the website is facing stiff competition from the world stage. How can we take care of that? Let us ask ourselves one question so fundamental in marketing: Who are your primary clients? For an owner of a small power tools website, conquering the world is highly impractical, especially in the face of tough worldwide competition. But how about trying to meet the needs of clients in the immediate locality? That's a more manageable maneuver. Let's say that the locality is Toronto, Canada. You just have to change your keywords a bit, e.g. “power tools Toronto”, “Toronto power tools”, “power tools shop Toronto”, “power tools for sale Toronto”, “Toronto power tools for sale”, etc. While you may not stand a chance at the world market, you can obtain plenty of clients from the locality, and these clients will be a constant source of profits.

Updating is a Must

Suppose that your website already contains plenty of write-ups. Can that make your website's search engine rankings high? Don't count on it just yet. While having write-ups are good, you have to constantly update the content in your website. Fresh content is immediately indexed by search engines, and if there are good keywords, then your website will hold its own against the competition for search engine visibility. Check out the SEOmoz article on how fresh content can influence rankings to understand better. Search engines ignore websites that stagnate over time. And with stagnant content, even if your website is still on the first page of the search engine results page, no visitors will come because they always want fresh content. If it's 2012 already, how would you feel if you land on a website which was last updated in the year 2009?

You Can't Go Overboard with Keywords

It is right to place keywords for SEO purposes. However, you may think right now of something like placing two instances of keyword phrases every sentence in an article. Never, ever do that in SEO. Search engines can identify which websites have too much of the keyword in their articles without contributing information of satisfactory quality to the world. Thus these search engines penalize these websites. Their search engine rankings can be reduced. In some cases, these websites can even get banned from search engines. Now, let us ask: How much is too much when it comes to placing keywords for SEO purposes? The rule is: try to make your web content as humanly written as possible, then you can have the keywords comprise 2-5% of your article. For example, if the percentage of keywords in your article (also called keyword density) is 3% and your article contains 1000 words, you need 3% of 1000 = 30 instances of the keywords in your article. Keywords are best used in moderation.

After SEO - Be Informative and Persuasive

Now that you have done SEO writing successfully (or you may have hired someone to do it skilfully for your website) and you managed to generate visitors to your website. At this point, you should find out whether your content is informative and persuasive. Will the content be successful in imparting useful information to other people? Also, if your website is a promotion website, can you get people to buy your products for sale? The first part of writing web content – getting visitors to your website – is done by SEO; the second part – getting visitors to stay and to trust you and your website – is accomplished through high-quality content. However, the first always comes before the second, so you'll need the best of both worlds. ”

“Have you ever wondered how the search results of every query on a search engine are ranked? Within a fraction of a second after hitting the search button, hundreds of pages are shown as a response to a query made. But the results displayed do not just randomly appear. The ranking of the pages are determined according to how it is effectively optimized through the use of Search Engine Optimization or SEO.' The degree of optimization in a website depends greatly on two things: the content and its deep links. The content of a website should be informative, interesting and credible. The website should also be easy to navigate, has proper headings and subheadings for different pages and should be aesthetically appealing. But all the efforts given in creating a high-quality website will be of no use if there will be no visitors. Here is where the second most important factor of SEO comes in – the deep links. These deep links do not only correspond to the links of sub-pages in a website but also to the different websites that link back to your own. These links that point back to your website contribute to increasing its popularity, raising the chances of being in the first pages of the search results. Search engines measure the rank of a website through the number and popularity of the webpages linking to it. Reputable sites link to other trusted sites while fake sites don’t receive as much links. When your website is among the top results, the potentials of maximum visibility and frequent visitors will both increase. Search engines use links as a means of getting from one page to another. Links are like the buses that go from one bus stop to another, gathering passengers. With the internet, links are the buses that go from one document to another, while searching for other materials that match the query. Through the complex algorithm of search engines, links show how different pages are related to one another. The goal here is to have a lot of reputable websites that link back to your own. But since not all links are spam-free and trustworthy, link building doesn’t promise benefits solely for the webmaster. Backlinks from reputable sites (e.g. universities and government) and trustworthy sites with established visitors increase the positive results of link building to your website. On the other hand, backlinks from fake advertisements and gamble sites should be evaded as much as possible since these create a reputation of poor quality links that point to your website. If your goal is to be among the top results and make use of internet marketing, establishing high-quality backlinks is what you should aim for.

Link Building Strategies

There are different ways through which you can get links for your website. One of the many ways is buying links; the more expensive the link is, the better. Another is asking for links which can be done through email and other social media sites. This is a manual process so it can be tedious. You can also do link exchanges with other webmasters that have the same goal as you. Another way is to register your domain with a number of directories to increase its traffic during queries. You can also submit your own articles, sub-pages and press releases to different host sites. This can be very effective since it allows your own content to be seen in a reputable site. Do check out the Point Blank SEO's "Link Building Strategies – The Complete List" where you will get details about all kind of link building tactics.

Link Value

Since the exact algorithms of how search engines determine a link value is largely unknown, some factors that may affect link value must then be taken into consideration. The page ranking for the relevant keywords, the number of links on a certain webpage and its potential referral traffic all signal how much a value of a link is.

Page Ranking for Keywords

In order to determine how much a search engine values a webpage, look for the keywords and phrases it targets. The higher the rank of the webpage, the greater its value compared to the others.

Number of Links in the Webpage

Getting backlinks from webpages with few links are better than being linked to pages with a large number of links. The value of a link is affected by the number of links it appears to with.

Potential Referral Traffic

Link building does not only improve the degree of a website’s optimization but most of all, it opens the website to a greater audience – giving it better chances of developing through the internet. Link building is at the core of optimization. It may be a very tedious process but the benefits that can be reaped from this process will greatly increase the likelihood of getting your business in the spotlight thus allowing it to make its way through the world of internet marketing in a more promising light.”

“There is no doubt about the fact that the internet is one of the most amazing products of technology. It seemed impossible long ago but now, sending mails that typically take a few months to get delivered, only seeing your relatives when you visit them personally and doing a 30-page assignment for months and researching the old-fashioned way are things of the past now. The internet is like a giant and dynamic library that houses various information about everything and anything at all. And with the help of search engines, finding your favorite chick-flick from decades ago and reading your favorite trilogies to doing your brain-wrecking assignments are now all possible, thanks to the internet and the search engines (and the people who upload the information, of course). You’ve probably wondered once about how these search engines work. Don’t these things amaze you? You just type in the search box whatever you want to see, read or watch and within seconds of hitting enter, the results are all in front of your eyes. And, the best part here is, the results are ranked depending on what matches your query most. Have you ever wondered how these information is filtered from the billions of information in the internet and are accurately delivered to you in less than half a second? It may seem simple but search engines actually involve a lot of complicated algorithms. Thanks to the power of Search Engine Optimization or SEO, everything can be categorized properly thus everything can be easily searched. SEO or search engine optimization is the process of getting ranked on major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing, search result pages and get traffic to our website / page from them. It can also be defined as the process of getting traffic to a website from "free", "natural" or "organic" listings of search engines. All the search engines have these types of results, where they show web contents like articles, videos, etc., from websites which they consider authoritative and relevant to the search query made by the user. Like paid search ads, we don't need to pay the search engine to get our website ranked on the search result pages. If you are new to SEO you might find it difficult to understand the process of SEO in words. That's why we have added the "Introduction to SEO / Search Engine Optimization" video here from Search Engine Land.

What Is SEO:

The video will help you to understand all the basics of SEO. Updated: Search Engine Optimization is a kind of powerful web marketing strategy that helps search engines find your website and rank them against the billions of other websites in response to a query made. In other words, Search Engine Optimization is like a traffic enforcer that lets you pass among the many other cars to advance and be in the top results of a query. Usually, the higher the rank of a website in the search results is, the more visitors it has. And since it is “popular”, more people will likely visit the site. After all, based upon the results, this is the website that has the most information in relation to what they’re searching for. Therefore, SEO is used to improve a website in order to help increase the traffic that it receives from search engines. Companies that incorporate SEO continuously find out what keywords or phrases would increase their websites’ traffic and devise ways to make their websites more search engine friendly. These techniques increase their website’s hits which in turn increases its traffic, giving the companies more chances of marketing and selling their products and services. This find-filter-rank process may seem simple but within the half of a half second, different processes have already been done. At the heart of Search Engine Optimization are four functions: crawling, indexing, calculating relevance and rankings, and delivery of results.

Crawling

Imagine the different bus stops in your city. This first function is like a bus that goes from one stop to another, collecting passengers. The same thing happens in the internet, the different pdf’s, photos, documents, articles and other files that are uploaded in the internet are the bus stops which the bus “crawls” through to see if the required data are present. Afterwards, they collect information from it and “bring” it back to the search engines.

Indexing

When the search engines have found the websites among millions that contain the keywords you’ve entered, they store pieces of data from these sites in huge drives for recall when needed. Imagine how billions of information are stored and shown in a fraction of a second. Amazing right?

Calculating Relevance and Ranking

After finding the pages that contain the queried words, the search engines determine a website’s relevance to the keyword entered. This filters the millions of webpages in the internet and returns results that are most relevant to the search. And since webpages with more visitors are perceived to have more value, they occupy the higher ranks. It is by filtering webpages through relevance and importance that Search Engine Optimization works.

Delivering of Results

After filtering and ranking, the search results are displayed. You can assume that the webpages on the first pages have what you need while those at the last pages may also contain your queries but do not receive as much visitors or have less information when compared to the ones provided in the first page. SEO is actually just one of the many techniques firms use to increase their website’s traffic and gain more visitors. As a marketing strategy in the internet, it maximizes a website’s potential by organizing it according to the actual keywords people search for, how search engines work, how accessible the contents are to majority of the search engines and removing barriers that would hindrance crawling and indexing to their websites. Have you tried SEO? What do you think about the potential of SEO in terms of website traffic?”