As many of you already know, your website’s content will either benefit or hinder your SEO strategy. This is true no matter what kind of website you run; whether it is for a product, service, or for yourself. Either way, I’m sure you’ve heard it before, your content is king! The issue is, most people don’t understand how to develop content that satisfies both their readers and their page rankings too. It is a difficult balancing act; one that is not easily accomplished.

But I’m here to help; I’m going to walk you through how to create the best search engine optimized content, not only to help you gain traffic, but to help you retain visitors as well. I mentioned earlier that in order to do this it requires a balancing act on your part. What you will be balancing is the quality versus the quantity of the content you will be producing. Let me explain…

THE BALANCING ACT

Content is judged differently depending on whom, or what, is viewing it. A user, or a person, will judge it based on how much personal satisfaction they derived from it. A search engine, like Google or Bing, will judge it based on a less personal assessment. There are three major factors when talking about how a search engine will judge your content; they are your content’s keywords, its length and how often it’s updated. Therefore, in order to create an effective article, you must take all four of these elements into account equally and without biased (the reader’s satisfaction, your content’s keywords, your content’s length and how often it’s updated). It seems easy, I know, but there are some important steps to follow if you want to guarantee your content’s legitimacy.

THE STEPS

STEP I: Write you content with your website’s main theme in mind. You always want to relate the ideas presented in your article to the ideas presented in your main Meta description.

STEP II: Your content is always written for the reader first and the search engines second. This is because without your visitors’ support, no matter where you are in the search engine page rankings, your online business will never be successful. But remember, it’s a balancing act.

STEP III: Your article’s length can be determined by what it is you are writing about and how much information you are trying to get across. Again, thinking about writing for your readers first, the length you choose must be in correlation with what you believe your readers’ attention spans will be. Sometimes, like when writing a blurb for an advertisement, you want to be short and sweet. On the contrary, if you’re writing something for in-depth analysis, you might want to use more words. It all depends on what you think will work best.

STEP IV: When developing content for your readers, you want to make sure you have an interesting voice; something that sounds lyrically appealing. Obviously, this trait corresponds with all good writers and takes a certain amount of skill to pull off. Not only that, but something that sounds good to you might not sound that good to someone else. It’s a good idea to read your content out loud and to others as a test run of sorts. This allows you to absorb their input and make any necessary corrections before you let your visitors see it.

STEP V: Using keywords is no doubt the hardest part of writing an effective article. This requires you to combine your interesting voice with certain keywords that will help search engines categorize your website. This does not mean cramming the same word a hundred times into an article just so search engines notice it, but rather using synonyms of that word and placing it discretely within your content. This is where the idea of ‘quality versus quantity’ really comes into effect. By cramming too many of the same word into your content you’re successfully decreasing quality and upping quantity. By not using enough keywords just the opposite happens; quality increases while quantity decreases. Follow these few rules and you’ll never find yourself uncertain about how much is too much ever again.

1. Use the Google AdWords Tool to determine what keywords you want to use.

2. Use the majority of your keywords near the beginning of your article; preferably within the first paragraph.

3. A good rule of thumb is to calculate how often your keywords are used; anywhere between 2-4% of your article should be dedicated to your keywords.

4. Using synonyms allows you to place more keywords into your content without sounding repetitive.

5. Remember, you are writing for your audience first! Meaning, no matter what you do with your keywords, make sure your content is relevant and comprehensible.

STEP VI: Updating your content frequently forces search engine ‘robots’ to crawl your site more often and, as a result, improve your page rankings. Updating doesn’t necessarily mean adding a sentence or two to an article; it means updating your website on a whole. So, whether that is adding some new media, articles, pages or whatever, it doesn’t matter. As long as updates are being made, the search engine ‘robots’ will have to crawl more often.

In conclusion, when writing SEO content for your website, there will always be a balancing act between quality versus quantity and writing for your readers versus writing for search engines. Knowing how to make the right compromises in order to achieve perfect SEO harmony takes practice, but by following the guidelines I have set forth I hope I can make the process a little easier.

Ryan Beldham @ http://MyWebRevolution.com