A common question we get from clients is…
“How do I write a search engine optimised (SEO) content for Google?”
First things first, the search engines have moved and will continue to go in the direction of listing quality content websites over “well-optimised” sites. This is why for a long time now, it has no longer been about the number of words or the keyword density on each web page.
What Google and the other search engines want, is to display websites that fulfills the search query of their users.
And that’s why our article writing service is unique in Singapore in the sense that we don’t charge on a per word basis. In fact, we don’t even allow our customers to indicate the number of words they want for their articles.
Simply because we know they don’t matter from a ranking point of view and even less… from a conversion point of view.
What truly matters is the intent of the search and creating content that best describes this intent. And to truly bring out the essence of that particular message, we can’t put place a word count.
Too short a content and there might not be enough information for readers to understand the topic. Too long a content and the writer might end up repeating the same point over and over again.
Context is King. Not Content.
At the end of the day, every industry and niche is different.
If we’re writing for industries like accounting or finance, there’s naturally a lot to research on and write about.
But if we’re talking about a technical subject like hardware… there’s going to be more specification and factual information rather than opinionated content.
It’s the same reason why we don’t focus on keyword density either – an old school tactic that is no longer effective. Gone are the days where you need a certain “percentage” of keywords to be relevant for the topic.
Today, Google uses latent semantic indexing (LSI) to understand that same topic plus its related synonyms and subjects. This gives context and helps them decide who gets placed higher on the search engine results page (SERPs).
How We Plan Manuscript’s LSI Content
For instance, our website is centred around the topic of copywriting in Singapore both as a service for clients, and as a resource for entrepreneurs and freelancers. It doesn’t help our readers if we kept repeating the words “copywriting” again and again without giving context to the other related terms.
Topics such as SEO copywriting, FB ad writing, marketing consultation, content writing agency etc are inter-related to our main focus keyword.
Being domain experts, it naturally comes easier for us to identify a list of keywords around the topic. Likewise, if you’re planning your own content, you would know intuitively the relevant search phrases even before doing any keyword research.
And once you have an article structure laid out, the next step is to get it written whether by yourself or outsourcing through an article writing provider like us.
Our Content Writing Template
That being said, we still believe in having a systematic approach as it makes it easier to both manage our writers and help them create quality articles fast. By introducing a certain structure to our work, it allows us to maintain a higher writing standard while keeping our costs down.
Great news for our customers as they know the article they’re ordering has been thoroughly fact-checked and proofread for grammar and spelling.
For your convenience, here’s the SEO content writing template our writers refer to:
Page Title
In most cases, the page title will contain your H1 tag as it should also be the most prominent headline on the entire page. Given its natural importance and for logical reasons, it is common to find the main keyword in the page title.
Headlines and Sub-headers
In the past, SEO writers would spam the sub-headers with keywords to achieve their keyword density goal or because they believe there is higher ranking weightage. These days, your article could get penalised as it doesn’t appear natural and can be seen as keyword stuffing.
Title Tag or Meta Title
Different from your page title, the title tag or meta title plays perhaps the most critical role in terms of SEO content writing. After all, this is the first set of data or information the search engine pulls out and displays about your web page. That said, you don’t ever want to spam keywords in your title tag as the search engine can choose to ignore them or worst… penalise your site for spamming.
Meta Description
Another element that used to be important in the past, today, the meta description no longer holds much weightage in terms of SEO ranking. However, we would usually include the keyword here if it makes sense as the meta description serves as a small “advertising” window to encourage higher click through.
LSI Content
As mentioned earlier, the most important thing about content writing is context. Which means including LSI related terms. In fact, former Google head of webspam mentioned before that they prefer sites that don’t try to focus on optimisation but rather focus on creating quality content. And LSI is the best way to go as it shows a deep understanding of the subject in question.
Final Words on SEO Writing
As you should have noticed by now, content writing today is no longer about keywords. A good quality article revolves around the topic and its related terms to create context.
What that means is…
Proper research on a topic is a critical aspect of SEO writing. Not keyword placement. And definitely not keyword stuffing.
It’s for this reason that we don’t emphasize on word count in our article writing but rather on producing quality content useful to the reader.
Naturally, there are other elements to consider as there are over 200 algorithms that affect ranking like anchor text, internal and external links, and link placement for some of the more prominent on-page SEO factors. And we haven’t even started talking about off-page SEO yet.
However, using our SEO content writing format has helped many websites improve their SERPs ranking, especially with a proper strategy in place. After all, it takes a complete and holistic SEO approach to rank a website.
But with our template and a reliable SEO plan in place, you too could start seeing similar results for your website.
