How to Write Search Engine Friendly Articles & Reviews

If you are in internet marketing as a business, you should already know that diversifying your income sources is an important role for the long term success. I’ve seen many beginners hitting the jackpot with an offer with only paid traffic sources, and didn’t know what to do when the offer was gone.

At my company, we focus on both paid and organic traffic sources, therefore SEO is an important part of our daily lives. Today, my goal was to create a simple guide for our new interns about how to write search engine friendly content, but I’ve decided to write a blog post about it, and share it with my readers also.

The tips about writing SE friendly content I’ll share will be exactly what my new staff will get as an initial guidance.

Writing Quality, Search Engine Friendly Content

We run a number of blogs, product review sites, comparison sites, quality content sites and more. So, this guide is intended to offer information about writing search engine friendly content in general. Whether you are writing a blog post or a product review, the general guidelines are the same. So, here we go;

1. Start with Market Research

Understanding your competition and the audience should be the first step. Start with a simple Google Search and see what others are doing first. You have to get a feeling of what others are saying about a topic before writing any content. Try to make this a habit and always start with a general market research. When you get more experienced, it will be a piece of cake to understand how much competition is out there for a given term, and you will start shaping your content and guesstimate what you can achieve before even writing the title.

2. Do the Keyword Research

For most writing jobs, using Google’s Keyword Tool is more than enough for general keyword research. I’m not going to get into the details of keyword research here, but you have to check both phrase match and exact match numbers, and also the number of competition on Google for the specific keywords. If the main keyword you are planning to target is too competitive, you might try to target a longer tail, and less competitive keyword phrase. After making a decision on your main keyword phrase, it’s time to plan your content.

3. Create an Outline for your Content

The success will come from choosing the right title and attention grabbing introduction. If you don’t have a catchy title, the chances are your readers won’t be interested in clicking on your link and read it. Even if they click and start reading, you have to grab their attention in your first few sentences. Outline your content, write short notes about how your introduction paragraph will start, what will be in the further details, will you use a list form, how you will conclude the article, will you be using any images or not, etc. If you don’t come up with a simple outline, it’s pretty easy to get lost while you are writing the actual piece.

4. Write your Content

I have written thousands of articles, blog posts, product reviews on hundreds of topics. Am I an expert author? Hell, no. English is not even my native language. But data shows me that quality always beats quantity in the long run. You should focus on offering value to your readers. Ask these questions to yourself; If you’ve read your own article, would it offer any value to you? Would you bookmark this site? Would you be checking related or more articles on the site? If your answer is yes, you are on the right track.

If you can combine quality with quantity, you will get more organic traffic. But don’t write long just for search engines. Write long content only if there’s value to offer in it. Longer content means higher chance of getting long tail keyword traffic.

In the old days, stuffing your keywords in title, meta tags, and in the actual content would do the work. But Google and other search engines are getting smarter every day. So, instead of keyword stuffing, focus on quality stuffing. I’m being asked the same question all the time; “What should be the keyword density in an article?” My answer is, I don’t know. I don’t remember when I’ve checked the keyword density of my content last time. Forget about keyword density. Use your target keyword, and all possible variables, even synonyms in your article when writing. When writing a product review, try to use the variations of the product name. So if the product name is “Dell Inspiron 1525″, try to use variations like “Dell Inspiron1525″, “Dell Inspiron-1525″, “Inspiron Dell 1525″, etc. in your actual content.

Writing complicated content won’t bring you the nobel prize. Keep it simple, clear and make is easy to understand for your target audience. Remember, when people search, they are not looking for academic level writing, they are looking for answers, information, easy to read content.

5. Proofread your Content

When you are done writing, if possible, have somebody else proofread your content. Other than checking the spelling and grammar errors, focus on the quality of the article. Does it sound overly complicated for the target audience? Does the introduction grab your attention?

The best way to proofread your own content is; write it, leave it for at least a few hours, and come back to proofread it before publishing it.

If you owned a similar website or blog, would you link to this content? If your honest answer is yes, you’ve done an excellent job.

These are the simple steps I personally follow when writing an article, a product review, or a blog post.

When you have quality content which brings high value to the target audience, it will be like wine. It will get more traffic while it ages. More sites will link to it, more people will use it as reference, and you will enjoy absolutely free, organic traffic for the lifetime of the content you’ve just created.

Whether you personally write content, or order it from writers, following these simple steps will help you succeed in writing quality content which will generate organic traffic in the long run.