Writing well optimised content for your website is an essential part of the foundations for your SEO campaign.

Think to yourself, what is the point of writing content if no one can find the website or internal pages?

The biggest tip for writing good content for SEO in 2014 is to write it for your audience in mind, not for Google!

Google used to reward well optimised, keyword rich content by ranking them well in the search results, however in recent updates Google now looks for websites with the best overall user journey for the keyword searched by the user.

This means a strong website with high quality content is essential to being considered worthy in Googles eyes.

Writing optimised on-page content

After you have chosen your focus keywords and mapped out the most appropriate target pages, you may have to edit the on-page content to increase the quality of each page.

Begin by re-reading the existing content on the page, would it answer your questions around the focus keywords?

The content should be edited to provide value to your website visitors, put yourself in the visitors position and ask yourself:

Does this information provide relevant answers for the search queries that you are targeting?
Does it meet a need your visitors may have?
Is it relevant to your website/business?

When writing the content for your website it is useful to have your keywords in front of you, keep referring to them to remind yourself of the information you are trying to relay to the user.

Remember less is more now in terms of adding your keywords, be sure to add keywords where it makes sense and ensure that it feels natural.

When it comes to placing anchor text links into the content, ensure that they add value to the reader and links are not added to try and boost SEO.

Optimise your title tags and meta descriptions carefully – these fields are used for marketing opportunities and not just a place to stuff keywords to boost SEO.

Use this opportunity to draw in visitors; what is the page all about? What is the focus?

Remember that Google display the title and meta description in search results – see this as a chance to ‘advertise’ your website and ‘sell’ to the user that your site has the answers to their search query.

If you use images on the page, ensure to use the opportunity to name the images accordingly and use the Alt Tag option preferably with a keyword.

Often people will write the content for the web pages and then look to insert the keywords afterwards, however this can often lead to keyword stuffing which will not seem natural to Google and therefore you could put your website at risk of receiving a penalty.

Remember: High quality content is more important than the quantity of keywords on the page, the image above possibly has too many keywords in the content according to the latest updates from Google.

Mistakes to avoid

Marketers used to follow a keyword density percentage, however with Google algorithms now focusing on the overall user journey the algorithms now look at the page bounce rates, time spent on page and conversions rates.

It is now more important than ever to ensure the information in the content is useful to your visitors and natural (organic) to avoid the visitors leaving your site immediately and increasing bounce rate. Things to avoid include:

Over optimisation i.e keyword stuffing and unnecessary anchor text links
Content that doesn’t supply a demand
Boring and long paragraphs without clear call to actions

Be careful of over optimising your content, this was once rewarded by Google however it is now one of the many factors that Google will look at, find and penalise a website for manipulating search engines, we recommend added your keywords at least once or twice if it seems natural, however it is dependant on how much written content is on the page.

Overview:

Focus on creating high-value content that achieves business objectives as if search engines didn’t exist.
Focusing on enhancing the natural authority of your website and internal pages, which creates industry influence and trust with Google.

Avoid keyword stuffing at all costs – keep it natural.

Produce smart on-page optimisation (SEO copywriting) using the language the audience uses when searching and socializing, so Google sees you as the most relevant option.