Balancing Writing For Readers And Writing For Search Engines
When you start learning about search engine optimization (SEO) it’s very easy to get confused and start focusing only on search engines and forget about your audience. But, that would be a huge mistake. SEO needs to be done so that your audience can find you, but it shouldn’t be done instead of providing excellent, valuable, and usable content that your audience relates to.
Avoid Keyword Stuffing
Let’s say you want to write about leather purses because you have a good deal on them. So, you decide to write an article about the versatility of leather purses so that you can demonstrate the purse you want to share, and you want your audience to buy. Your keyword is “leather purse” so you put that in the title, the headings, and within the first 100 words of body content. It’s important to use the term leather purse but you don’t want to use that term more than 2 percent of the total content.
Calculate Keyword Density
It’s easy to calculate keyword density. The way you do it is to count the number of times you’ve used the keyword and count the number of words in the content. Then divide the number of times you used the keyword by the number of words in the content you’re analyzing. Multiple the answer by 100 to get the percentage. For example, if you used the keyword 10 times and you have a 600-word article that means you have a keyword density of 10 divided by 600 = .01666 x 100 = 1.67 keyword density. You don’t want more than 2 percent keyword density, so this is a good number.
Check Your Headlines
You want to use keywords in headlines. Ideally, you want the keyword to show up in the first three words. But, you want it to sound right too. Leather Purses: Versatile, Carefree & Stylish. This is a good title because it lets you know that the article is going to show that the leather purse is something anyone can use for any event. The keyword “leather purses” is going to be part of the URL yoursite.com/leatherpurses and not the entire title.
Use Synonyms
When possible, to avoid going over two percent keyword density use other words outside of your title tags, headers, and subheadings. Choosing synonyms is a great choice because then you can talk about the topic, but not overstuff the keywords making the content look strange. You might want to use words like clutch, pocketbook, or other worse that describe the same thing that the word purse does.
Know Your Audience
Your content is for your audience, not for search engines. You want to use the tools of the trade to get more eyes on your content, but you don’t want to write content or create any type of content only for search engines. You want every piece of content you create to be interesting, useful, and effective for your audience. Therefore, write for your audience first.
Your audience is the most important part of your business. They are who you create products, services, and content for so that’s who the content needs to be created for too. When you put them first, the rest will be almost natural.