The purpose and practice of writing successful SEO articles
I was so excited to read your post! Google icon Matt Cutts was blogging on August 21 and he hit the nail on the head (as he does quite often). The title of the post was “SEO Tips: Writing Useful Articles That Readers Will Love.” That, in itself, says it all. Why is this such an exciting post? Because it reinforces what I have been saying for years. Whether you’re writing content for a website, an article, or any type of SEO copy, you need to think about the reader first.
There are a lot of worthless items floating around the net these days. Useless, keyword-filled rambling that was obviously written with the sole intention of trying to rank high. Striving to rank high is not a bad thing, but the purpose of writing SEO articles is threefold, not one: to provide information, rank high when used on your site, and increase link popularity. That means practice must follow purpose.
Why write an article?
Let’s start from the beginning. Why write articles to begin with? While having SEO content on your site is a good thing, your first concern should be providing helpful information to your readers. Cutts agrees with this practice and highlights why providing relevant and useful information is vital.
If the information is not useful, those who visit your site will have little interest in reading it. Yes, if the page ranks high, it might attract some traffic. But if visitors take a look at your article and then click, what good have high rankings done for you?
Similarly, if you choose to distribute your article over the Internet, it is very unlikely that others will choose to publish your article on their sites. If your work doesn’t provide solid information and is poorly written, it won’t be considered link-worthy.
Optimization for engines
Once you’ve decided what information you want to provide, you can focus on SEO. Copywriting for the engines requires balance. You never want to sacrifice reader experience for the sake of rankings. Stuffing keywords into the text is a method that will almost always backfire. Virtually no one wants to read an article (or web page) that constantly repeats the exact same terms to the point of extremes.
Cutts also addressed this issue in his blog post, stating that he included key phrases within his own article and also used similar terms. Cutts suggested that we pay more attention to the use of key phrases (and the use of variations of those key phrases) than to keyword density.
The two most important keys
The two “meta-issues” that Cutts highlighted in his article were related to user experience, not the practice of SEO copywriting. First of all, pay attention to the content you offer. Always transmit useful and concrete knowledge to your reader. Second, study your niche (aka your target audience!) and write specifically for the purpose of helping them.
There is some other great information included in Cutts’ post, and I encourage you to read it in addition to the comments that follow. You can find it here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-writing-useful-articles-that-readers-will-love.
These are things that I (and other SEO professionals) have been preaching for years. First the user, second the search engines. When you get the priority right, the rest will fall in line without much trouble.
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