When writing content for the Internet, it’s important to write not only for the human visitors to your site, but also for the search engine spiders that are out there scouring the Web for new content to include in their search results.

We covered writing content for visitors to your site in the first part of this series (see here). In this segment, we look at writing specifically for search engines.

Search Engines Love Keywords

Your goal in writing for search engines is to place at or near the top of search engine results, and one of the primary ways to do this is to concentrate on keywords and keyphrases. Think of keywords/phrases as your article trimmed down to its bare bones. Keywords/phrases are the essence of what you’re writing on (and what your visitors have been searching for), and you will want to rely on them heavily when composing your articles.

How To Use Keywords

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a constantly shifting field, but there are some general rules that you should adhere to in terms of using one element of SEO, keywords:

  • Decide what your keywords are. Whether you’re using one keyword/phrase or more, decide early on what they are and stick with them. Each article you write should focus on a limited amount of keywords that are scattered throughout the article.
  • Use keywords often, but not too often. In terms of keyword density (covered more in Using Keyword Tools To Improve Search Engine Placement), or the amount of times a given keyword appears in your article, most sources say you should aim for your keywords/phrases making up about 3-5% of the overall text of your article. Don’t go beyond this, or you may be seen as spamming the search engine by keyword stuffing.
  • Use keywords early. Put them in your title, in headings, and definitely early in your article. You should also scatter them throughout your article, but not more than would be considered natural.

Optimizing Keywords

Our section on keyword tools gives you additional information on how to optimize keywords for maximum effectiveness, but we will cover a few general rules and tips here.

Consider what people are searching for, and how they are wording their searches. Use real words and the way people talk/type to structure your keywords. Use different tenses of words, plurals of words, and different spellings of words, if there are ambiguities about the spelling (ex. workplace, work place). Just make sure in any one given piece that you pick one spelling and stick with it for consistency’s sake.

Use locality when creating keyword phrases, particularly if you’re writing about a place or business. For example, “our office” is fine, but “our Cleveland office” is going to pull in a lot more relevant visitors. This type of descriptive writing should be utilized throughout your article whenever possible to make full use of keywords. For example, when discussing a motel, which phrase do you think is going to get your page seen more by the right kind of visitor:

“This small motel offers stunning views of the mountain.”

“This Rutland motel offers stunning views of Killington mountain.”

Additional Keyword Tips

  • Use alt tags on images. If you’re using images with your text, be sure to fill the alt tags with keyword-rich descriptions. Alt tags are used not only by the visually-impaired and text-only browsers, but also by search bots to figure out what’s on a page. Think of these as free keyword-display areas.
  • Spend some time with keyword tools. With the right keyword tools, you can find variations on keywords that are currently being searched on and learn if you are using them enough in your own articles. You can find examples of both these kind of tools in our article Using Keyword Tools To Improve Search Engine Placement, as mentioned previously.
  • Keywords make up only one part of search engine optimization. We’ll be covering more aspects of this important area in the near future.