1. WRITING FOR SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS
Search Engines aren’t going to sign up for an e-mail list, and they aren’t going to buy your products and services. However, they can bring a great deal of traffic to your posts.

When someone writes for search engines, they predetermine their keywords, analyze their keyword density, and write out phrases exactly as they’d be searched for. These posts will have a great formula to rank well, but rarely will humans find them valuable enough to give backlinks or shares. They tend to be textbooky and (yawn) boorrrring.

2. WRITING FOR HUMAN CONVERSIONS
Knowing that humans will be reading these posts, some bloggers will structure their content around linking to services, encouraging e-mail list sign ups, and pushing their calls-to-action.

These come across very dry and informational. Kinda like sales letters. How many times do you jump for joy when reading a sales letter? That’s if you even stick around long enough to read the whole thing!

3. WRITING FOR HUMAN INTEREST
I see this one usually from the small business owner who writes well, but knows nothing about internet marketing. They’ll set up their posts with great care and structure their content like it’s going to be judged for a Pulitzer. However, if Search Engines don’t rank it well no one’s going to find it, and if you aren’t motivating your readers to action all you get out of it is maybe an appreciative reader.

Depending on your business and the kind of blogging you’re doing, especially copy writers and creatives, that may be acceptable and even viable, but for most businesses it’s mostly a waste of a good opportunity.

PUTTING TOGETHER THE PERFECT BLOG
Now that we know the Big Three, how can we pull them all together so they rank well, convert, and aren’t as boring as listening to your great uncle ramble on about the good ole days?

First, think what would your audience find interesting. Before what keywords you want to rank for, think about the human interest factor. What’s interesting to my readers? Now, think about how you can point that interest to how you stay in business (aka “sell stuff”). Finally, when you’re writing think about keywords, then go back and re-read the post and change a few words and phrases to contain the keywords and keyword phrases you want to rank for.

Thinking of human interest first and human conversions a close second, you’re taking a more effective (and opposite) approach than most do. You can always read through your post title and content and add in a search engine keyword phrase throughout your content (like I just did right there), but it won’t be as dry and boring as a grade school textbook.

So think about how to write great content with your own unique voice, but also how are you going to drive readers to contact you, and what keywords you will be targeting in your content. Happy Writing!

Your Keyword Density Ratio would be the ratio of keywords-to-“normal” words in any particular page or post on your website. The lower the density, the less search engines will feel you adequately address the desired topic and search terms. The higher the density, and you could be down-graded or penalize for what is called “keyword stuffing.”

The bad effects of very low Keyword Density, or pretty obvious. If you don’t talk enough about the search terms your potential customers are searching for, then you won’t be helped in your SEO via your on-page content (which is paramount).

“Keyword Stuffing” is just as bad, because the search engines will know that you’re trying to fool them. It’s basically search engine spam. You might remember the older sites from the 90’s which featured, say, a white background, and after you reached the bottom of the page, you could scroll and scroll, but couldn’t see anything, then noticed one day that there were a whole bunch of seemingly random words at the bottom of the page in white type over the white background. This used to be a trick (bad SEO tricks are called “Black Hat Tactics) that website developers used to try to trick the less-advanced search engine algorithms of the day.

These days, search engine algorithms are highly advanced, and will easily recognize more Black Hat tactics and penalize a site’s ranking which uses these “tricks.”

A good rule of thumb for Keywords is around 3-5%. This is arguable, as some suggest keeping it between 1-3% of content, and other suggest going as high as 8%. So, we’ll take the middle road and recommend 3-5% keyword density. What does that look like for our auto mechanic friend? Take a look:

“ABC auto repair in Santa Monica is a family owned and operated domestic auto repair shop which specializes in fixing and maintaining all your domestic vehicle needs. No matter what issues or problems you’re having with your car, whether it’s low idling, or your check engine light suddenly comes on, or even if you just need a quick oil change, just come on in to our Santa Monica shop on Washington Blvd, and we’ll treat you like family! Our domestic auto mechanics are here six days a week to take care of all your repair needs. See you soon!”

That paragraph has a real keyword density of about 3%. You might read that and think “there’s 101 words, but 16 keywords, so isn’t it around 16%?” Good thinking, but when you group search terms together, they count as one instance, not individual words. Example, “Auto Repair” is one search term, so that will factor in the keyword density ratio. Likewise, so will “domestic auto repair” and “santa monica” which is individual search terms, at least in this case, and not three different keywords.

Now, all that being said, does it really truly matter? Only the geniuses who programmed the algorithm of the best search engines like Google will know for sure (even though they’ll tell you even they can’t predict 100% search result accuracy), but the results have suggested that when you keep the suggested keyword density for desired search phrases and keywords at 3-5%, your SEO will be helped out.

One last thing which is important to note. Yes, we’re mathematically trying to achieve an optimal keyword density for top rankings, but notice that the copy still read very well for humans. This is extremely important, because even if you rank number one on all the search engines, but have horrible content/copy which isn’t written for a human to read and be affected by, then you still aren’t going to see much improvement on the bottom line.

To summarize, always research your optimal keywords, and make sure above all else your content is written for humans first and foremost, then tweak the sentences and paragraphs slightly to achieve the optimal keyword density of 3-5%. Then, hope that you have many reputable backlinks pointing to your site for even better results.

Happy content writing! Please enter your thoughts in the comments below, or check out one of our other articles in the list immediately following this article, and as always feel free to contact us or download our free marketing ebook to help you out even more.

Most websites these days are Content Management Systems (CMS) built in WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, or any number of other CMS platforms. The great thing about CMS websites is that they are blog-enabled from the jump. You will have your blog ready to make easy updates to either from your computer or your mobile phone app, and you can even edit your blog entries, create tagged links to help connect like-blogs together, and help keep your site alive and currently updated by search engine standards.

Having a Blog on your site increases your Page Ranks in search engines, and enables you to share each post easily with your Social Network communities. This way, you’re constantly pushing out relevant value to your followers, and keeping more and more traffic going to your website. Search engines like this, and your future customers will love it.

When you blog, you want to Blog about things your customers would like to know about, or would find helpful. The titles of your blogs should be similar to what people would be searching to find out on the search engines. This is going to help your Search Engine Optimization (discussed later in it’s own section), so make sure you have a few KeyWords in your titles and throughout your content.

A Blog post’s length is debatable, but we would suggest  about 500 words or so (this one has 761). Also, try to keep your paragraphs short and to the point. On the web, the longer and more intimidating your posts and paragraphs are, the less likely they’ll be read. Stick to a 3 or 4 sentences per paragraph and about 3 or 4 paragraphs per post, and you should be fine.

Blogging and Content can have an eBook all to itself, but one more tidbit (before our extra bonus trick!) is to think about what style of blog post you want to write. You can write a list Blog, like a Top 10 list, or an article-style journalist-like prose post, just to name a couple. Think about what fits best for your writing style and subject. If you’re a beginning, the I just making a bunch of list Blog posts, like Top 10 Things To Know About (Insert Something Related to Your Business Here), for example.

One extra bonus trick:
Blogs will have the ability to allow user comments below each Blog post. If you allow this, be sure to either not allow links to be pasted in the comments section (or you’ll get a ton of spam), or turn comment approval “on” so that a site admin has to approve any and all comments before they are live to the public. A better option than those, however, is to use the new Disqus or Facebook Connect commenting options. Once a visitor has an account with Disqus or Facebook, that visitor can “sign in” to your site using their Disqus or Facebook log-in and freely comment. The great thing about the Facebook Connect commenting is that there will be a box pre-checked to post that user’s comment to their Facebook page. This will also place their comment on your Blog in the Newsfeed of everyone in their social network. This allows more exposure for your Blog post, website, and business thanks to the great visitors who took the time to contribute to your posts with a comment. The visitor has the option of un-checking the box before posting the comment, so it’s not anything forced on the commenter. You never want to force your customers to do anything. Forcing them will result in buyer’s remorse at best, and very very bad feelings, bad publicity, and lost customers at worst. Be respectful, be thankful, and always add value in every way possible, like your business and/or brand depend on it. Because…it does.

Action Item: Does your site currently have a Blog on it? If so, are you blogging in a way which is going to generate the most attraction from search engines, and will provide the most value to your visitors? Are your posts the right length that they’re not too short to not be valuable, and not too long to be unreadable?