When writing content for the web, it ends up in one of two places.  It either ends up on your website as additional content, or it ends up as syndicated content for the rest of the web to use. Unfortunately through this, I believe that SEO’s have gotten somewhat of a bad rep due to the fact that a lot of the content being dumped onto the internet has a tendency to be…. worthless junk.

Let’s bear in mind that the ultimate objective of this content is to gain incoming links to your website as part of a link building strategy. Just because these are link objectified pieces of content, that is not a free pass to scribble the first meaningless and unrelated thought that comes to your mind. Keep in mind that in one way or another, this content will all point back to your site.

Please don’t contribute to littering on the Information Superhighway.

For this blog I have come up with a few general ideas to help SEO writers create better content for the web.

1. Define. Then Describe.

State your objectives, findings, purpose etc. at the very beginning.

DO NOT MAKE YOUR READERS READ THROUGH AN ENTIRE DOCUMENT TO FIND THE INFORMATION THEY NEED!
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2. Don’t Force a Writing Style on a Subject that Doesn’t Fit

Don’t sell when you need to inform, don’t inform when you need to entertain and don’t entertain when you need to persuade-

In my opinion, the way you approach the reader will come down to deciding if the service and or product being written about is a need or a want. If you are writing for a need, they already know they need your product, so tell them why you are the best over your competitors, not a run-down of your services (unless that is what differs you from your customers).

If you’re writing about a want, make your readers need it.

But don’t try too hard. Really– People are a lot smarter than you give them credit for.

For example, take a dry cleaning business that is trying to sell services- No one really cares about the origin and history, famous dry cleaner owners or statistics on the dry cleaning market. Why? Cause that is dumb and nobody really cares!

Understand what your audience needs and give it to them-
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3. Utilize White Space

For the unfortunate event that in most times when uploading articles for distribution, SEO content writing and even press releases, we only have the option of uploading strictly text. Depending on the website that you’re uploading it to, you may or may not have the option to add images or video to your content.

If this is the case, your only tool for improving the readability of your article is white space.  White space essentially refers to the spacing of your paragraphs and the way the paragraphs are broken up.

Along with the other rules of starting a new paragraph such as new thoughts, topics, new place or dialogue changes, a paragraph can and should start at a point of emphasis. Each Paragraph should begin with a sentence that sticks out to grab your readers attention.

MUCH LIKE THIS ONE! READ THIS!
My recommendation is to try to keep your paragraphs for articles for distribution down to four or five sentences for the sake of structure fluency and to avoid overwhelming readers with giant blocks of text.
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4. Copy word text into notepad and save to eliminate characters

This seems like a slightly obscure thing to do, BUT- is very important.

How many times have you gone to read blogs, articles, pages etc.  and they have random characters and formatting on there like €, £, ¥, µ, β or ∞? This happens because more than likely the document was copied directly from software like Microsoft Word and then placed into the upload form. Microsoft Word is software and the letters, numbers and characters all have their own internal code. So when this code is transferred into a strictly text format, you’re bullet points will be off, spacing will be off, and many other issues as well.

What I suggest to you is to copy and paste your content into a notepad or WordPad. By copying and pasting your document into a WordPad or Notepad you will remove all of the characters that word as put in there and see the formatting that would appear if uploaded “as is”.

Once the characters have been stripped of the writing, reformat your writing to get the desired appeal you were going for.

Readers and consumers want credibility, give them what they want. Good writing is a start, good delivery is better.