SEO web content - Express Writers

Writing Great Web Content: Your Ultimate Guide

June 19, 2024July 3, 2018 by Adam Oakley

Fact: There’s too much bad content on the web. In fact, there’s so much crap, people are having a hard time discerning which sources are legitimate, which facts are actually facts, and who can be trusted. People’s trust in the mass media has largely eroded, as a Gallup poll has shown. This distrust isn’t random – the internet has largely helped sow these seeds. So, what happens when you swoop in with accurate, valuable web content? It’s a light in the dark. Great web content is a torch that leads the way, setting an example for other content creators. Best of all, you give readers exactly what they want, need, and crave. That’s why we’re here with this extensive guide on how to write great web content. Learn how to build this type of lasting, strong web content, right now in today’s “ultimate guide.” The Ultimate Guide: How to Write Great Web Content 7 Ways to Write Great Web Content for Blockbuster Blogs 1. Make the Headline Sing Appeal to the Human Brain Keep It Clear, but Don’t Insult Their Intelligence Use Better Wording 2. Give Away Your Best Information in the Intro Start with the Hook Tell Them WHY They Should Care 3. Organize Your Points Explaining a Concept? Go from Basic to Complicated Writing a Tipsheet? Go from Most-Important to Least-Important Writing a Guide? Go Step-by-Step 4. Reference and Link to High-Quality Sources 5. Check Your Research 6. Write the Right Blog Post Length 7. Illustrate Your Points with Images 4 Ways to Write Great Web Content for Landing Pages and Web Pages 1. Write an Actionable Headline 2. Make the Body Copy Skimmable 3. Stay Benefit-Focused 4. Write a CTA That Shouts at the Reader Take Cues from the Headline Encourage, Inspire, and Motivate the Reader to Act 5 Examples of How to Write Great Web Content (the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly), Plus: THIS Is How to Write Great Web Content Examples of Lackluster Web Content – Don’t Make These Mistakes! [bctt tweet=”When you create great web content, you help set the standard for publishing useful, accurate information online. More in today’s guide by @JuliaEMcCoy” username=”ExpWriters”] [bctt tweet=”Learn how to build lasting, strong web content in our ultimate guide on the topic via @JuliaEMcCoy” username=”ExpWriters”] What’s the Anatomy of Great Web Content? Writing good web content calls for hitting a series of bullseyes. All of them have to do with satisfying your audience. (No surprise, there.) No matter which industry you’re writing for, no matter what topic you’re covering, greatness always follows this anatomical structure: The Brain: Is it educational, informative, or practical? The Skeleton: Is it well-organized? Does it make sense as a whole? The Muscle: Does it pull you in? Does it make you want/need to keep reading? The Heart: Does it entertain you? Does it resonate? To make sure your web content hits home, include each of these vital parts. Here’s how. 7 Ways to Write Great Web Content for Blockbuster Blogs Web content like blogs requires a fair bit of finessing and fiddling to make them truly great. Take the time to check off each of these boxes, and you’ll be well on your way to web content greatness. 1. Make the Headline Sing A great piece of web content worth its weight in gold starts with an amazing headline. We’ve written plenty about how to optimize your headline for SEO, but how do you craft a headline that appeals to readers? How do you create one that’s just plain good? 3 Ways to Write Better Headlines 1. Appeal to the Human Brain Humans are really predictable. Luckily, when you’re sitting down to write your headlines, you can bank on this predictability. There are a few things we love to see in headlines, stuff that makes us far more likely to click them or keep scrolling to read the content underneath. Here’s what we know. Take these points into consideration when you write your headlines. Try to incorporate one (or a few) into your phrase/sentence: The human brain is attracted to numbers. In fact, a portion of our brain cells is dedicated solely to recognizing and interpreting numerals. When you include them in your headlines, you tap into the human desire to quantify value. Examples: “5 Easy Ways to Save Money,” “10 Tips for Baking a Delicious Cake,” “3 Great Reasons to Start a Savings Account” Humans hate feeling uncertain. Let’s put it this way: uncertainty = anxiety = stress. If you leave your headlines too ambiguous, you’ll stir up that unwanted uncertainty and drive people away. According to a well-known study by Conductor, most people prefer explicit headlines that help them understand what they’re in for if they read your blog or article. [bctt tweet=”A portion of our brain cells is dedicated solely to recognizing and interpreting numerals. When you include them in your headlines, you tap into the human desire to quantify value. @JuliaEMcCoy” username=”ExpWriters”] People are asking questions in search. In particular, more and more people are using voice search to get information, and asking questions in full sentences. Answer them in your headlines! Framing your headlines as answers will also help you rank for popular voice search queries. Examples: “How to Jump-Start a Car” “How to Bake a Birthday Cake “Here’s Why You Should Start a Savings Account” 2. Keep It Clear, But Don’t Insult Their Intelligence When writing headlines, many people forget about a key ingredient: clarity. Without clarity, your headline will be too confusing to appeal to readers. Plus, it will stir up the uncertainty we mentioned above, which is never a good idea. Of course, it’s just as easy to go the other direction and come up with a headline that’s way too simplistic and obvious. Case in point: Instead of stating the obvious, focus on readability. To help you keep it clear and understandable, consider using a tool that will score the readability of your text, like Readable.io. Just paste your headline … Read more

SEO-Optimized Web Content: How Do You Optimize Without Overdoing It?

January 1, 2021March 15, 2014 by Adam Oakley

Search engine optimization? Isn’t that dead? Nope! If you thought it was, then you were misinformed. SEO isn’t dead or dying, it’s simply evolving, according to our SEO predictions for 2014. And it’s still important to know how to optimize without overdoing it. When is the last time you overdid something? Be honest! We all overdo things from time to time because we get wicked excited or have a habit of overthinking and second guessing. It’s nothing to be ashamed of because it amounts to human nature. But when it comes to something as important to your business as SEO-optimized web content, how do you make sure you don’t overdo it? Is there anything wrong with overdoing it? That’s exactly what we’re going to discuss. The SEO Golden Rule There’s a golden rule in every industry, isn’t there? In a lot of industries, the golden rule boils down the age old saying, “The customer is always right.” When it comes to the content industry, I’ve heard a slight various to this adage: “The audience rules.” Fact: you can create a beautiful website packed full of content, but it’ll be dead on arrival if the audience doesn’t like it. Truth: the audience really does rule the content kingdom. According to KISSmetrics, the golden rule of on-site optimization is this: When using any…SEO elements [don’t] overdo it. The thing about golden rules is that they really should not be broken. And when it comes to search engine optimization, you DON’T want to break the golden rule. So, to answer one of the questions we posed in the beginning of this post, YES there absolutely is something wrong with overdoing SEO. Don’t believe us? Let’s talk consequences… The Consequences of Breaking The SEO Golden Rule Or… …why you don’t want to overdo SEO. Let’s be brutally honest, shall we? Most of us small to medium sized business owners broke the rules to get where we are today. Thinking outside of the box and stretching AND breaking the rules are part of entrepreneurship. But along the way we learned that certain rules cannot be stretched or broken without hurtful consequences. Writing over optimized web content is one of them. Back in March of 2012, Search Engine Roundtable published an article entitled, Cutts: Google to Target Overly SEO’ed Sites within Weeks. You should definitely check out the audio recording from Cutts in the article. In case you’re unfamiliar with the name, Matt Cutts is the person to know when it comes to SEO. He started out with Google in 2000 as a software engineer, and today he’s the head of Google’s Webspam team. Breaking SEO news on the dos and don’ts of search engine optimization—especially the don’ts—come from him. When Cutts speaks up, you listen. Back in 2012, Cutts made it clear that websites overdoing SEO were going to get unwanted attention: they would be penalized by Google. The idea was to level the playing field and promote a right way of doing SEO-optimized web content. As you can imagine, the change in policy caused a sizeable stir. Fast forward to today, 2014, and the policy still stands. If you overdo SEO elements on your website, it won’t help you; it will hurt you. Your search rankings will drop, and you’ll end up in the one place you don’t want to be: Google’s penalty box. So, how do you do optimized web content without over optimizing? How do you cross your T’s, dot your I’s, and come out on Google’s good side? The working tactics just might surprise you. 3 Ideal Tips for Optimized Web Content Search engine optimization doesn’t have to be hard. In fact, it comes down to using a little common sense and knowing where to look if you have questions. A lot of well researched and credible resources on SEO are available online; just to name a few: Search Engine Land, HubSpot, The Content Marketing Institute and KISSmetrics. But we’re here to get you started with some simple, common sense tips to keep you from overdoing web content optimization: Forget about keyword density. When the three little letters s-e-o come together to form the content marketing buzzword SEO, we tend to see people automatically raising questions about keyword density. If my blog is going to be 500 words, at what density should my keyword be? If I want to insert my keyword 4 times, how many words should make up my content? Forget about keyword density. I know, I know! It goes against everything you’ve had drilled into your head about SEO since this type of optimization started. Trust me; we know how hard it is to kick old habits. But this is one that has to go. Even Matt Cutts says there’s no such thing as an ideal keyword density. Stop keyword stuffing! Cutts’ video talks about this tip. Google frowns heavily on keyword stuffing, which can happen due to unnatural overuse of a keyword or phrase. The keyword to note here is “unnatural.” It’s okay to incorporate keywords and phrases into your web content. In fact, they still need to be there so search engines can understand what your content is about. But don’t stuff them in like a Thanksgiving turkey. The trick is to craft them into the copy so that it reads naturally, as if the words were meant to be there. Never, ever strain to use keywords, jamming them in for the sake of presence versus readability. Don’t go link crazy. Since the New Year, you’ve likely heard a lot about SEO and backlinking. Pay attention to the links you choose to use for backlinking. Why? Because you don’t want to be spammy. That is a big no-no that will land you in Google’s penalty box. Rule of thumb: only backlink when the link is relevant to your content and expands on it in an easy to see manner. In other words, don’t backlink to content that is a stretch in comparison … Read more

Website Content Writing 101: Stop Worrying About Keywords, & What to Focus on Instead

August 25, 2022December 25, 2013 by Adam Oakley

If you, like me, have been in the world of website content writing services for a while, you remember a not-so-distant time when online writing was all about keyword inclusion. Namely, how many keywords could you cram into a given web content page, and would Google notice? While many marketers are still relying on tactics like these, Google and other search engines have changed drastically. It’s gotten to the point where marketers who have not evolved their content strategies are being left behind. While Google used to rely on keyword inclusion as a reputable quality metric, today’s search engine algorithms are much more sophisticated. Today, Google looks at things like social signals, site quality, SEO, link strategies, image inclusion, content layout and length, besides just keywords. While keywords still have an important place in the world of online content, focusing too much on keywords can come at the expense of your other content. In light of this, it’s time to toss keyword reliance to the wind and to focus, instead, on all of the other things that make the world of web content writing go around. Improve Your Content Writing on the Web By Focusing Less On Keywords Only In the days of old, a page needed few things to rank well. For one, it needed a high keyword saturation that helped Google interpret what the page was about. In addition to that, it needed a link strategy and some on-page content. That was about it. Today, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Google has gotten amazingly advanced in the last several years, and sites that are to rank well in today’s version of Google need to have dozens of different high-quality ranking metrics, including good SEO, high-quality visuals, a solid social strategy, following, and base of shares, and a relevant, long-tail keyword strategy. Unfortunately, marketers who are too busy focusing on things like keyword saturation and density often miss these nuanced things. The Modern Face of SEO Web Content Today, SEO is virtually unrecognizable to professionals who worked in the old SEO styling. Today, anything that’s considered to be solid in terms of SEO web content writing must optimize for two things: people and search engines. If this sounds like a tall order – you’re right! Modern SEO as a whole is complicated, and it requires a set of guidelines and a skilled team to execute it properly. Here’s a list of some of the basic foundations of modern SEO content mapping, to help you get a feel for how it works today: Modern SEO utilizes long-tail keyword phrases in natural ways It optimizes for people first and search engines second It seeks to provide value and solve problems rather than to sell directly It gains its success from click-throughs, conversions, and shares It is more conversational and less technical It adapts frequently to changing consumer desires and needs How to Improve Your SEO Web Writing Right Now: 5 Tips When it comes to content writing for websites in the modern world, improving SEO generally means making the web content writing more functional and valuable. While there are dozens of great ways to improve on-page content and ensure you’re making the most of common SEO standards and practices, the following steps are an excellent way to get started improving your SEO: 1. Get social with your web content writing Social media is a key element in great SEO, and it’s one of the most important things for both humans and search engines of today. While social media is often written off as a waste of time or a platform that’s more suited to leisure than it is to marketing, the fact of the matter is that great SEO often starts on social media. By using social platforms to distribute high-quality content, interact with followers, and build a base of devoted fans, it’s easy to improve your social following across the board and enjoy a boost in Google rankings, as a result. 2. Create a two-way dialogue in your online copy Want to encourage customers to keep coming back to your web content? Show them that you appreciate their existing interaction! While many companies brush over comments, likes, and shares, the trick to creating a successful online presence is to reach out and encourage engagement with your customers. Have a new Instagram comment? Take a moment to thank that person or company for taking the time to comment. Have a new Facebook question or mention? Respond to it! While this may not be directly an SEO writing tactic, it’s a simple step that can go a long way toward improving your overall visibility on the web and ensuring that your customers can find you, wherever they happen to be online. 3. Shoot for long-tail web content keywords Right now, long-tail keywords make up 70% of all search volume. Because of this, they’re a critical thing for marketers concerned about good SEO web content to target. While the whole point of this article is that it’s wise for marketers to avoid focusing on keywords too much, long-tail keywords are a wonderful thing to include in your overall content strategy. Since long-tail keywords are highly specific, including them in your copy is a wonderful way to target it to your customers and boost your SEO by ensuring that the people who visit your site are qualified leads who are there because they’re ready to purchase or convert. 4. Beef up your linking strategy in your website content Linking has been a fraught topic in the world of SEO for years. Before SEO advanced to the point it’s at now, so-called black-hat SEOs used to stuff content full of spammy links to trick Google into ranking it well. Since then, Google has cracked down on these exploitative practices. Today, links can benefit your copy, but they have to be executed correctly. This means plenty of high-quality internal and outgoing links that point to other, valuable content and (in the case of outgoing links) sites with a high DA score. This helps communicate … Read more