SEO Essentials: 5 Fundamentals for Creating Content that Search Engines (and Readers) Will Love

Search engine optimisation (commonly known as SEO) has a sort of secretive aura around it. People shell out tens of thousands of dollars to try and discover the “secrets” behind it. If you go online and look around for half an hour, you'll be assaulted with hundreds of eBooks, online courses, and seminars about SEO and gaining traffic from various search engines.

Truth be told, getting good SEO traffic isn't that hard. Here are five simple steps you can take to create great content that search engines love:

1. Write Relevant Headlines

Your headline plays a huge role in determining how search engines rank you. If you're writing an article about the best aquariums for tropical fish (and you want people to find you by search for “best aquariums for tropical fish”) make sure to use those words in your headline.

Don't try and get cute or write some esoteric headline about your subject. Make it relevant to the content so that search engines know what you're writing about.

2. Use Plenty of (Helpful) Links

Link what you've written to other related articles. These could be other pieces of content in your site or posts that have been published by someone else. There are two advantages to this system.

Firstly, linking to other areas on your own site keeps people reading your content for longer. This makes it more likely that they'll buy something and that your website will rank higher in various search engines.

Secondly, linking to other sites will get your content noticed by different webmasters. These people may promote your content as a result, or link back to you in the future.

3. Write Content that Readers Enjoy

Google, and other search engines, rank your content based on how much time visitors spend on your website. The faster people leave, the worse your content ranks. This means that your articles have to appeal to readers and keep them around.

Many people make the mistake of focusing on what they think search engines like while ignoring the needs of their readers. This leads to people leaving the site quickly and, ironically, articles getting ranked poorly as a result.

4. Make it Easy to Share Your Articles

Twitter, Facebook, and other sites are all great for gaining traffic. If readers like what you've written, and they should, they'll be more likely to share the content with friends. Getting social media links on an article will help it to rank higher in search results and give you additional traffic.

If you've got great content people will spread the word and help boost your search rankings for you.

5. Find an Interesting Angle

In the world of SEO copywriting there's something called a “long-tail keyword.” These are search terms that may not be super popular, but still drum up a lot of traffic. Finding these and ranking for them can make your content get a ton of new traffic.

Instead of writing about a broad topic, look for a way to narrow yourself down and discuss a unique angle feature or benefit that people might be looking for.

6. Closing Thoughts

If you're still confused about SEO, hire an outside source to help you. Our Singapore copywriters are SEO wizards and can incorporate professional SEO copywriting with intelligent web design to get your site ranking sustainably - with zero "SEO tricks" involved, giving you a huge traffic boost and plenty of potential customers.

Image credit: Paloma Gomez Squeeze Creatives is the parent company of Singapore Freelance Copywriter.