The more I am advancing with content marketing, the more defensive I get towards how people write content.
Gone are the days when simple tactics such as Keyword stuffing worked for ranking a page. But ever since Google rolled out its penguin update, user experience became the priority for ranking a page.
Google puts a lot of algorithms to determine user experience. One of those is the content itself.
Today, the key to successful Search engine optimization is to balance your content for both humans and Search engines.
Okay, this sounds round right, but how do I Begin ?
To begin, you need to get your content in place. To be more specific, your content creation strategy. To streamline your content for both humans and bots, follow the tips I compiled below.
Tips to Write Content for Both Humans & Bots
1.) Be the consumer
An awesome way to make sure your product is awesome is to be the customer itself. This also applies to content itself.
Before you begin to type a post, you should spend a considerable amount of time on researching. The key is to understand user needs and cater directly to them.
The research would help you plan your content creation and keyword strategy. This way you can satisfy both your readers and search engines.
Think about these questions :
- Before writing the post : If I would search for this thing, what query would I use ? (for coming up with ideal titles)
- While writing the post : What can be done to make the post more easy to scan ?
- After writing the post : Would I be willing to read such a post ?
At Scribbify, I believe that Content is anything that adds values to reader’s life. Thereby you should think from reader’s perspective.
2.) Keyword stuffing hurts !
Gone are the times when spammers ranked their pages by producing junk content and stuffing keywords. But Google and other search engines have evolved dramatically after that.
These days keyword stuffing does no good and hurts you instead.
On one hand, it doesn’t add anything to user experience and on the other hand, you are on the verge of getting penalized by search engines.
3.) Follow the Basics
What good is your content if it doesn’t get in front of the audience ?
To make sure that your content stands fine in search results, below are some ideal places where your keyword should be present.
Remember, don’t get carried away !
- Title : Don’t make the title more than 70 characters. Try to keep the focus keyword as close to beginning as possible.
- H1 : They are the most important tag on your web page and indicate crawlers about page. Not only this, they are also important from the human point of view. Ideally, you should use <H1> tag only once on each page.
- Description : This is sort of summary of your page and shouldn’t be longer than 160 characters. This part also stands in search results and thereby your keyword should be present here as well. Write the descriptions in such a way that it encourages users to click on the page.
- Alt tag : Search engine crawlers are bots, they can’t see images. This is why you should describe the image in the alt tag of the image. It would be a good idea to insert keywords here, but as always, don’t get carried away.
- Permalinks : The shorter, the sweeter. You should insert the focus keyword here too. They are visible in SERPS and can dramatically impact the CTR ( click through rate ).
- Post Body : The keyword for which you want to rank for, should be included at the top of the page. It should also be present two to three times in the copy but with variations of focus keyword.
4.) Deliver what you promise
If you are ranking a page for a specific keyword, make sure the content is actually relevant. If you don’t do so, you would mess up the user experience and ultimately loose rankings.
Anything that you mention in places mentioned in step 3 should describe only what the page is about.
5.) Internal Linking
Linking to other relevant pages is always a good idea. It passes juice to those pages and also keeps users moving and reduces bounce rate as well.
The key is to bring users to your landing or priority pages.
Make sure you link with the right anchor text. You should keep linking in control, too much irritates both users and bots.
6.) Make Content Easy for Scanning
If you place too much text in a single paragraph, you’ll soon see users skipping the whole content.
I don’t know how you would feel, but to me, I don’t like my hard work going down the drain. You should make the content easy to swallow for readers.
- Avoid large paragraphs of text, they make text boring and users tend to skip them over.
- Use formatting options efficiently to make copy user-friendly. Use bullets for lists.
- Use font effects such as bold, underline and Italicize to make the strong points stand out.
- Make effective use of H3 or H2 tags to break content in pieces.
7.) Allow the Writer to Write Naturally
If you deploy all the points mentioned above, this won’t be an issue. The variations will occur on their own in the copy and the copy will become easy to scan, and visually appealing at the same time.
Interlinking would reduce bounce rate and bots to other pages of your website.
According to me, your content should be something that adds value to reader’s life.
You should produce or re-purpose content only if you are sure you can add more value to it.
Optimizing it as per the latest SEO techniques would get it in front of readers and provide an audience.
Conclusion – If you aren’t able to put up all these tips to work, you should let our agency handle it.
With an in-house team of professional writers and SEO experts, our agency knows how to produce content that works.
You can request a quote and get the content written on your behalf. If you too have been cooking such content, tell us what hardships you face while optimizing content for both humans and bots.