Writing for Search: Good for Reading, Good for Results

Search engines are smarter than you think and every year they’re getting smarter.

They have different ways to determine the relevancy of the content to your topic. Trying to stack your content to trick search engines may work temporarily, but in the long run search engines will probably catch on. And that will result in you losing your site’s rank or even getting sandboxed.

Think Hierarchal

When Google scans your content, it places greater importance on the content at the top of rather than at the bottom. It would therefore be better to concentrate your top keywords at the top and gradually introduce secondary synonyms from your keyword list later in the content. Do not switch to synonyms until at least your 2nd or 3rd paragraph.

A great way to add keywords is to use lists instead paragraphs. You can use keywords in each of your points. For example, if your keyword is ‘Car Dealership’, you could make a 5 point article with bold titles such as ‘Car Dealership Rule #1’. As long as it makes sense, it’s fair game. This is a great way to add plenty of keywords to your content in a way that Google values.

Any words in your article that are unique to the basic ‘paragraph’ text are considered special by search engines. Bold, italic, h3 or what have you are all game. Make sure you sprinkle some of these special features over your keywords when appropriate. When it comes to making links, this is especially true. Instead of using ‘click here’ or ‘more’, use your keywords as links.

For example, ‘learn more about car dealerships’ (italics is the link).

Your H1 heading is the most important spot on your site for SEO.

Make sure your #1 keyword is represented here. One tactic used be SEOs is to create a limited number of H1 titles (too many will dilute their potency) and optimize them with keywords. For other titles without keywords, they will change the text size to H2 or H3. Then in the CSS (code), they will change the actual size of those titles so they look like H1.

That way, the titles look like they’re the same size, but only the ones with keywords are at the top of the pyramid when Google comes crawling.

Make sure to proofread your articles. Check your spelling and grammar before submitting. Believe it or not, search engines do check for these and will penalize your site if they’re poor. Search engines want to see good content. They don’t want to display poorly written material when there’s plenty of good stuff out there.

Think Mispellings

That said, you should make an exception for commonly misspelled words.

This is an often overlooked strategy.

For example, there is a sizable portion of people who spell ‘entrepreneur’ as ‘entreprenure’ by mistake. Find out how people misspell your keywords and pepper a few of them throughout your content. You may just draw in a sizable market share that others aren’t optimizing for.