SEO Writing for both the Search Engines and Web Readers: How to Gain Trust, Authority, and Create Value to Attract Targeted Web Visitors

SEO Writing for Both the Search Engines and Web Readers

How to Gain Trust, Authority, and Create Value to Attract Targeted Web Visitors

Samwel Katambi

Published by Samwel Katambi at Smashwords

Copyright © 2016 Samwel Katambi

Cover and internal design copyright © Samwel Katambi

This book is licensed for your personal use only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank your for respecting the hard work of this author.

All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. I’m not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

Website: http://www.samwelkatambi.com

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Table of contents

THE BIG PICTURE OF SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

INTRODUCTION

HOW SEARCH ENGINES WORK & HOW PEOPLE SEARCH

WHAT IS SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO)?

SEO BENEFITS TO YOUR BUSINESS

KEYWORDS RESEARCH IN SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION STRATEGY

HOW SEARCH ENGINES READ YOUR WEB PAGE

HOW PEOPLE SEARCH AND READ WEB CONTENT

FOUR STEPS TO SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION– STEP 1 & 2

FOUR STEPS TO SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION – STEP 3 & 4

HOW TO MINE VIRAL CONTENT USING LONG TAIL KEYWORDS

HOW TO WRITE VIRAL CONTENT AROUND LONG TAIL KEYWORDS

HOW WEB USERS READS A WEB PAGE AND HOW YOU CAN APPEAL TO THEM

HOW TO WRITE IN A NATURAL FLOW WHILE INTEGRATING KEYWORDS

HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR CONTENT

HOW TO PRESENT YOUR WEB CONTENT TO OFFER VALUE FOR THE READERS

WRITING FOR FAST READERS

HOW TO WRITE SIMPLE TEXT THAT EVEN AN ELEVEN YEAR OLD CAN UNDERSTAND

WRITE YOUR WEB CONTENT IN INFORMAL LANGUAGE

MAKE YOUR CONTENT EASY TO DIGEST BY USING SIGNPOSTS

HOW TO WRITE GREAT CONTENT HEADLINES

HOW TO GIVE VISITORS A REASON TO READ YOUR CONTENT - WHAT IS IN IT FOR ME?

HOW TO WRITE CONTENT SUMMARY - FRONT LOADING CONTENT

REMOVE HYPE AND TECHNICAL JARGON FROM YOUR CONTENT

HOW TO MAKE READERS STAY LONGER AND ENGAGE WITH YOUR WEBSITE

HOW TO USE VISUALS IN YOUR CONTENT

ADDITIONAL SEO TECHNIQUES

THANK YOU

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

GLOSSARY OF SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION TERMS

CREDITS

THE BIG PICTURE OF SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

If you’re responsible for writing content on your website, you have probably learnt many trips, tricks, techniques, and strategies designed to get your website pages to rank high in search engines results pages. Or if you’re a business, you might have been approached by companies and freelancers claiming to get you into top ten results page on Google and Bing.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is big business. Very few online searches move beyond the first page result. This make businesses fight for search engine results placement using practices and strategies grouped under SEO techniques. However, the reality is that nobody outside the search engine companies know how the search algorithms work.

There are blogs and websites devoted to dissecting how the search algorithms work. This has led to superstitious behaviors, best practices, and recommendations of how to improve ranking. But search engine algorithms changes over time, rendering previous best practices useless or even dangerous.

Have you ever asked yourself why search engine algorithms change?

Search engines algorithms change because search engines want to keep the search results relevant. This is the basis of search engine optimization – people and search engines want relevancy. The search engines are trying to provide the pages most likely to be relevant to humans doing the searches. They mostly do this by deciding which attribute of each page contribute to the relevancy. They then weigh all of these up to rank the different pages and display them in order on the search results page.

Perhaps you might ask, what relevancy exactly? The search engines are trying to measure the relevancy of the content on the pages. They’re trying to see how well written the content is. But the sad truth is most of the website pages have no relevancy.

People don’t write well when they’re somehow trying to optimize content through SEO. All they do is employing things such as keyword stuffing, hidden text, repetitive and uninformative chunks of text, cross-linking and a load of other techniques that provide a temporary fix to their ranking for specific terms.

True Search Engine optimization (SEO) is about writing concise, authentic, and useful content integrated with well-researched keywords. That content is likely to contain the terms (keywords and phrases) that people real search on while surrounded by similar, equally useful information.

In this book, you’re going to learn good writing tactics that incorporate keywords and phrases within content and how to present it in a powerful and effective that’ll make web readers and the search engines fall in love with you.

You don’t have to rely on dubious techniques that can work today and not work tomorrow. It’s far better to invest your time and money to create the best possible content you can on the subject you love rather than making your text meaningless to regular humans.

Welcome to true search engine optimization.

This is a living ebook. I’ll continue to update it over time as a discover new best practices as the search engines evolves. I welcome your suggestions and feedback.

Samwel Katambi

Author

www.samwelkatambi.com

Twitter:@katambis

P.S. If you’re new to search engine optimization, I’ve included a helpful Glossary of SEO Terminology in the appendix. Please refer to it if you run across terminology you don’t understand.

INTRODUCTION

Search engines work by keying in on the word-patterns people are looking for and returning relevant content. So people learned how to weave those patterns in their content so as to rank higher in search engine. All you had to do was to weave keywords that you want to optimize for, sit back, and enjoy your rewards.

At first, it worked, but then it didn’t work. Over time, this strategy has become obsolete and at the same time frustrating to businesses. Google, Bing, and other search engines have become more sophisticated. They want more than keywords to rank your website higher in the results pages.

Still, many in the online world don’t get it. Because when it comes to SEO, keywords are not all there’s to it. Contrary to a popular belief, search engine ranking position isn’t due to how you weave keywords on a page or post of your website.

Much of what determines the ranking position of your site in the search engine results pages (SERPs) are various signals in the form of links from other sites and social sharing. If your web page, article, or post content isn’t good enough to attract good, natural links and social sharing, it doesn’t matter how optimized the words on the page are.

So positioning your website at the top of search engine results page has become a somewhat hard endeavor. It has become difficult because search engines are now clever. They want you to provide value to the users and not just crappy keywords-stuffed content.

So when you sit down and plan to beat your competitors in search engine ranking position, you have to ask yourself a big question:

What creates value for my users?

It’s from this line of thinking that you’ll be able to do what everyone call search engine optimization – SEO. SEO is about getting links and other signals naturally by writing compelling content. It’s what online marketers call content marketing.

But getting links by writing compelling content is hard, in fact it’s the hardest part of search engine optimization. Because you need to write content that’s original, authentic and helpful and present it in such a way that it satisfy both the search engine and users (readers).

To master the art of search engine optimization so that it can benefit your business online requires you to fulfill two things:

1. To be a smart online content creator capable of satisfying the needs and desires of your audience. That’s when you become a good SEO copywriter. You create content that’s so useful that it appeal to the needs and desires of your audience.

2. The ability to weave needs and desires very well on your content before it can show up in the search engines.

When you do this, people will share your content links through various channels. They’ll link and bookmark from blogs, like, plus one, and retweet from social media platforms. That’s what make links and social sharing so important in SEO.

So the overall art of search engine optimization is summed up in one important concept: providing compelling benefits to the web readers in the form of content. As search engines continue to evolve by incorporating smarter search algorithms, people-powered social media sharing will deliver links and traffic as a reward for writing compelling content.

How do you create value (satisfy needs and desires) for your users?

Search engine optimization is writing content that works from a long-term perspective. Your strategy must be alive and well throughout the ages in the web. Your SEO strategy must not get outdated and rendered useless by search engine algorithms change.

If you want to optimize your business so that it can reap rewards in the long term, follow the following four steps:

1. Imagine as if search engines don’t exist. Then create high-value, original content that can achieve your business goals. The success of your business largely depends on how you satisfy your customers’ thirsty for their questions and problems.

2. Use the power of social media to gain exposure for that content. Share it and encourage others to share it. Interact with your readers consistently through your social media channels. This will results in natural links and other signals of quality and relevance to your website.

3. Focus on enhancing the natural authority of websites, pages, and individual writers, which creates industry influence and trust with the search engines. You do this by linking to credible sites that provide more information about the topic you’re discussing on your site.

4. Write your content using the language the audience uses when searching and socializing. Search engines will see you as the most relevant option when it comes to displaying search results.

Through these four steps, you’re able create audience-focused content exposed and shared through social media. This enables you to derive benefits to your business by building a profitable audience that’s an asset even if your search engine rankings are low. The SEO strategy you’re going to learn in this book is based on these four principles or steps. They’re the basis of search engine optimization.

In this book, you’ll learn various strategies and techniques of writing and presenting content for both the search engines and users. You’ll learn:

1. How to write compelling content that’s inviting to share and to link to.

2. Top-notch skills to optimize your web page so search engines know what it’s about and who might want to read it

3. How to write copy that converts readers to buyers

Before we dive further into this exciting journey, let us learn how search engines work. This is important knowledge because it well help you understand other concepts in chapters that follow.

HOW SEARCH ENGINES WORK AND HOW PEOPLE SEARCH

Search engines are the key to finding specific information on the vast expanse of the web. Without the use of sophisticated search engines, it would be virtually impossible to locate anything on the web without knowing a specific URL, the global address of documents and other resources on the World Wide Web. Thus, search engines have become an indispensable aspect of modern life.

But most of us don’t have a clue about how they actually work. Actually, you don’t need to know the complex mathematical algorithms working under the hood. You just need a high-level understanding of the basic mechanism so that it can help you optimize your website for relevancy and authority (more on this in the next chapter). It’s about understanding the general approach of how they work.

So let’s look at the three major components that power search engines, and the general approach to spoon feeding them so that they understand our content and rank us the way we want.

Crawling

You’ve likely heard of search engine spiders that crawl around the web looking for content. A spider is a program that automatically fetches web pages. Spiders are used to feed pages to search engines. It's called a spider because it crawls over the web, hence crawling. Another term for these programs is WebCrawler.

These are actually bits of computer code that find information on a web page, read it, read the sites meta tags, and then tirelessly continue along their journey by following links from your page to other pages.

Because most web pages contain links to other pages, a spider can start almost anywhere. As soon as it sees a link to another page, it goes off and fetches it. Large search engines like Google have many spiders working in parallel.

What is a meta tag?

Meta Tag is a special HTML tag that provides information about a web page. Unlike normal HTML tags, meta tags do not affect how the page is displayed. Instead, they provide information such as who created the page, how often it’s updated, what the page is about, and which keywords represent the page's content.

Meta tag

This meta tag says that Hege Refness created the page about Free Web Tutorials with keywords HTML, CSS, XML and JavaScript.

The spider periodically returns looking for changes to the original page, which means there are always opportunities to modify the way a search engine sees and evaluates your content down the road. And you can take advantage of these opportunities through search engine optimization strategy.

If for any reason the spider can’t see your content, or doesn’t understand what it’s about, your page can’t be indexed and ranked. This is why you website must be made of clean, secure and fast loading code.

Indexing

The spider isn’t just casually browsing content; it’s storing it in a giant database. This is called indexing. The indexing process extracts the important keywords, phrases and data from the code that makes up the page, to increase the efficiency of searching billions of pages for user queries.

The spider’s goal is to save every bit of content it crawls for the future benefit of searchers. It’s also gauging how relevant that content is to the words that searchers use when they want to find an answer to something.

Some helpful search engine indexing tips

1. Search engines rely on humans to submit information that’s subsequently indexed and catalogued.

2. Only information that you and all the people using the web have submitted is put into the index. Thus, when you query (ask) a search engine to locate information, you’re actually searching through the index that the search engine has created; you’re not actually searching the Web.

3. Search engines can return dead content links

Search engine indices are giant databases of information that’s collected and stored and subsequently searched. This explains why sometimes a search on a search engine, such as Google and Bing will return results that are in fact dead links.

Since the search results are based on the index, if the index hasn't been updated since a web page became invalid, the search engine treats the page as still an active link even though it no longer is. It will remain that way until the index is updated. And this is your job to make sure that all links to content on your website are active, updated and working fine.

4. The same search query on different search engines can produce different results

Because of two reasons:

1) Not all indices are going