Components of SEO Content & Keywords

Components of SEO Content

An SEO article is made up of two distinct, but very important components:

1) it has to contain relevant and value added content
2) it has to be supported by good website infrastructure (the ‘techy bit’)

As I have already mentioned, SEO article content must be topically relevant, and provide value to the reader. And as with a standard article on any conceivable subject that’s possible, it has to have a new angle, a good initial hook, and and it must be important to the reader. Writers of articles for all kinds of publication will tell you this; it’s what you learn on day 1 at freelance article writing school.

What they might not tell you until much later, is that in an SEO article content must include certain keywords and key phrases that are relevant to the topic, and the article context. These keywords and key phrases must appear seamlessly in the article, and not disrupt the natural flow of the piece; they should enhance it and be inconspicuous at the same time.

I’ll cover the ‘techy bit’ in the part 2 of this article.

Keywords and Key phrases

There’s no science to figuring out what keywords to use within the content of your article, so that they show up in search engine results. Forget about AdWords, keyword software, scientific algebrae, and costly training courses. In my opinion these are expensive sledgehammers being wielded to crack a nut,and in my experience, are only designed by people hoping to make a quick buck by taking advantage of what writers don’t know.

Here’s what to do. Sit down with a notepad and pen, and write down all the words and phrases that could possibly relate to the subject/business interest you are writing about. Almost all of these will (or should) be getting used in the meta data of the web page, but this will probably not be of your concern anyway (this is also covered in the ‘techy bit’ in part 2).

Some of the keywords you write down, can be used within the SEO article.

For instance, I recently wrote an article for a website that is in the business of superior tourist accommodation in the Scottish Borders – a bed and breakfast. The keywords and phrases I came up with were: “bed and breakfast”, “hotel”, “guest house”, “Scotland,” “Borders”, “tourism”, “accomodation”, “Scottish Tourist Industry”, etc.

However, in most cases, especially if you have been hired to write an SEO article for a third party, it is more likely you will be given certain keywords to use within an article in advance. This is fine – they’ve done the brain storming for you – but however they came up with the words and phrases, it’s your job to write a quality article that has them embedded in the text.

It’s not difficult, as you will see in part 2 of this article next week, when I look at applying the keywords and keyphrases, utilising hypertext links in text, keyword density, and web page optimisation (the ‘techy bit’).