Content writing is one of the essential foundations of Search Engine Optimization. Just as Bill Gate’s immortalized in his famous essay “Content Is King,” it is content what drives the internet today. This means that both notions are best understood via their interaction and dynamic: Content is what you produce to provide value to your audience. SEO are the techniques you use to make that content stand out.
More specifically, content writing – when viewed under the lens of SEO – refers to any piece of writing that has been optimized to be easily found and prominently showcased by search engine algorithms.
In any type of content (a website, blog post, or even multimedia,) you want on optimize for better internet exposure, and writing always plays a vital role. Even videos and images usually reach with titles, descriptions, and hidden keywords intended to tell search algorithms what they are, and suggest their value and relevance for people doing searches.
And notice that the word value keeps popping up. Yes, optimization is made for machines and algorithms, but content is for people. SEO in content writing always needs to consider both.
Providing value to viewers is paramount, but doing so in a way that also informs search engines is essential.
With that in mind, there are a few unspoken rules when it comes to SEO in content writing, and these usually lead the actions of any SEO content writer worth their salt.
Write for people first: This is the cardinal rule as far as content writing. There was a time, when the internet was younger, where black-hat SEO practices had keywords being plastered all over sites with text that were little more than blocks of spam. Since then, search algorithms have learned and now punish that toxic behavior.
Use Keyword-Rich Phrases: Keyword research is crucial to any SEO strategy, and content writing is a big reason why. Using relevant keywords during the writing of a value-providing piece of content is the recipe for organic growth and exposure to have your site scaling that SERPs ladder.
Effective Content writing is not limited to text: More on the technical side of SEO, most people might think that content writing only plays a role in text-form content. As mentioned before, multimedia content has text and hidden values that also require appropriate writing, and the quality of your phrases and word selection can be a boon or a weakness in any web design. So, this aspect of SEO plays a role in all instances and sides of optimization.
The effectiveness of abiding by these precepts has helped to shape the way in which we use the internet – and content – today, and is by and large the reason why content writing and SEO are almost inseparable from one another.