Ask any self-respecting writer about writing for SEO and you’ll most likely notice the disdain on their faces. A lot of writers, especially those used to working in print, find SEO content a bit hard to swallow.
Many search engine experts, in their desire to stuff copies with keywords, go a little overboard with the density. The result is copy that hurts the eyes and makes your ears bleed when you start reading it aloud.
If you’re writing material for SEO purposes, it doesn’t mean you have to fashion it into a piss-poor quality document that’s totally unpalatable to human readers. With a little work, you can get your SEO in while creating tolerable copy too.
1. Write for your reader too. Sure, you’re writing for a machine but you want to write for your reader too. A good idea is to write for people first, then go over the document and start fine-tuning the keyword density and positioning to make it great for SEO too.
2. Use a grammar software. People will still read you document so clean it up and make sure there’s not a grammar error between every other punctuation mark.
3. Use difficult SEO-required phrases as headers, titles and section splitters, instead of trying to fit them into the copy. Some words people are searching for just make no sense when used as a sentence (e.g. “no downtime review hosting linux”) You can just try to use them in the title of the copy or as section splitters if you can’t find a creative way to integrate the exact phrase.
4. Talk to the reader. As with web copywriting best practices, talk to the reader directly, instead of writing with an impersonal tone. Even SEO-intended copy needs to sell with content – how else are you going to make money otherwise?
