Writing a great SEO blog that gets noticed in today's overly competitive and highly saturated world of digital content requires a bit more effort than it did several years ago. Gone are the days when a few well placed (or casually plopped) keywords could secure decent page ranking and loads of visibility. Making sure your SEO blog is exactly what it's supposed to be – search engine optimized – presents a challenge far beyond just following one of the many tip sheets or checklists for optimal optimization. It means you need to stretch your creative muscles a little farther and 'feel the burn' that comes with thinking outside the box.
1. Keywords
In the world of SEO, content may be king but keywords are the crown prince. How else can your content be optimized so that searchers can find it if you are not using words and phrases relevant to what they are searching for? We no longer need to use technical and precise keywords to get good ranking. The reason for this is because search engines have evolved to allow natural language queries and are able to match conversational keywords and phrases with appropriate content. Another component of keyword usage that is becoming more applicable to search results is the use of local and geo-targeted words and phrases. If you are writing about something that is location specific, make sure you include keywords that reflect that. This allows mobile users to find places and points of interest nearby with significantly less effort (a requirement for on-the-go searchers and surfers).
2. In-Depth and Highly Relevant Content
To make your SEO blog more appealing to searchers and readers, you need to make sure your content outshines your competition. There is so much content available on the internet today that this challenge can seem hard to overcome, but it is actually easier than you think. First of all, your content needs to focus on one particular subject rather than several. Winnowing down the topic to a single one increases the relevance to a searcher's needs. You should also explore not just the usual subject matter but points of interest or unique highlights about that subject that haven't already been published to death online. Don't forget to add your own individual style and tone, to make your content truly yours. This allows you to give your readers the home-cooked version of the 'meat and potatoes' on a topic, rather than the fast-food version.
3. Careful Curation
A large percentage of content online today is curated. This means that much of it has already been published elsewhere and has been collected and rewritten to create a 'new' piece of content. Curated content is valuable to readers because it often touches on the more important points of a subject and leaves out the lower-value information. A big benefit of this practice for blog writers is that it allows you to create a post more quickly, because you are gathering previously published data and separating the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. This helps keep your blog activity level higher while you may be working on other things because you are still providing useful content to your readers and followers.
No matter what your SEO blog may be about, you can make sure it is more optimized for search engines by keeping the first two points in mind when creating content, and making use of the third point when you need (or want) to do so. The competition is fierce and the internet is drowning in content already, but yours can stand out – head and shoulders above the rest – when you adjust your writing strategy to keep your content visible and viable.
