Writing blogs and articles with the proper SEO-technical writing skills creates value for your clients as well as boosts your website ranking on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP). Always remember that both bots and human read your web content. The website crawler like Googlebot ( also known as ‘spider’ ) scans and index your website for relevant content and list them on the result page based on the keywords and key phrases. Therefore you should create content both for the Search Engine and your web visitors. Blogging should be an integral part of your marketing campaigns and web design project.
Learn to use various programs and create a highly effective content, blogs and articles for your website. You can also download the following checklist “Website Content Writing Guidelines” here.
Your Blogs/articles must have researched keywords
This is the most important part of the whole SEO writing process, yet the simplest one of all. Click here to learn how you can research the keywords related to your products or services.
Must Provide In-depth knowledge about the topic
Writing superficial and frivolous articles are boring to read and doesn’t establish you as an expert in your field. You should avoid writing articles and blogs solely for the SEO purpose or to manipulate the search engine. You must consider yourself to be an expert and provide in-depth knowledge about your expertise related to your products, services and industry.
Must be formatted using proper SEO guidelines
- Post title should contain your researched keywords
- Post URL should contain your researched keywords
- Use appropriate heading tags such as h1, h2, h3
- Use researched keywords in your headline
- Use keywords on the anchor text (the internal and external link on your post)
- All the images should have image alt tags with the researched keywords on them
Internal & external backlinks
Use appropriate anchor tags with properly researched keywords to create both internal and external links to and from your new articles. As you write more blogs and articles, link them with one another. Also, link various part of your website such as the products and services with the proper anchor text.
Must be an original and unique content
Do not copy content from other websites as it is. Check for the duplicate content using various free tools such as
https://smallseotools.com/plagiarism-checker/
After you write your blog always check your content so that search engine doesn’t see your content as a “copy and paste” from another website. According to Google’s Duplicate Content Guidelines, if you use duplicate content with the intent to manipulate the rankings, your website might be removed entirely from the Google index.
Must be grammatically correct
Use the spelling and grammar check on your word-processor to identify and edit any spelling and grammar mistakes. Also, check your final content using the following tools,
Grammarly for Chrome Add-on or
https://smallseotools.com/grammar-checker/
Article Spinner / Rewriter
Not Highly Recommended. If you detect duplicate content on your website, use the article spinner to avoid duplication. Article spinner helps you restructure and rephrase your articles to avoid duplication. If you decide to use article spinner use the manual/hand spinning rather than auto spinning. Here is a tool to spin or rewrite the articles,
https://smallseotools.com/article-rewriter/
Readability Test
Your message should be simple, unambiguous and clear to all your audience – from highly educated audience to less educated audience. This factor is determined using various readability scores. You should target the Flesch Kincaid Grade Level score of 5. For inspiration; The Sun Also Rises by Ernst Hemingway has Flesch Kincaid Grade Level of 4.1. Check your content score at
https://www.webpagefx.com/tools/read-able/
Note: If you are in a technical industry your readability score might be higher.
Generate Word Clouds
Generating word clouds is the easiest way to visualize your keywords density and frequency on your content. Larger and bolder text should contain keywords and key phrases.
Social Sharing (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube)
Make it easy for your audience to share and promote your content online using social share buttons. If you are using a WordPress site, you can easily add these buttons using the following plugins (for free),
https://wordpress.org/plugins/ultimate-social-media-icons/
https://wordpress.org/plugins/sassy-social-share/
https://wordpress.org/plugins/mashsharer/
Image selection
Do not use the images from a Google search. Most of those images are copyrighted and require permission from the owner. Use only Creative Commons (CC) licensed images that are free for the commercial use and requires no attribution, such as
Attribution required,
Others,
Note: You can also buy stock images from
https://www.istockphoto.com/ca
Image Formatting
Use Canva to create a quick design for your marketing campaigns, including social media and blogs. There are thousands of pre-made templates and layout to choose for various platforms and campaigns.
Canva tutorial: https://youtu.be/XqYti78riU8
Image Compression:
Compress your image so that your new post loads relatively faster. Large and uncompressed images make your website slower.
Proof Reading & Publishing
Ask your co-workers and friends to proofread your content. Find out how easily they understood the content and use their feedback to enhance your writing skills. Use Spelling & Grammar check on your word processor as well as the above-mentioned programs to check your document.
Do not publish the same content on 2 different platforms ( to avoid the duplicate content). For example, if you write a blog on your website, do not copy and paste it into your social media platforms.
Blog as a Social Media Post
Do not copy and paste the whole blog from your website on social media platforms. Instead, use the excerpts or summary of the post you’ve created as a Facebook content. Use proper hashtags on the keywords. Use the URL of your new blog/article. Use canva to reformat images to fit on Facebook posts.
If you run various social media platform like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc, you can schedule and post content on multiple platform using Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a social media management system that helps to monitor and manage multiple networks at a relatively short period of time.
Hootsuite Tutorial (including account setup): https://youtu.be/Bn6h9VrfWw0