Like most everyone, we want to cut out the part of our work that is difficult, boring, and takes forever. When we were in grade school, most teachers would hand out busy work while they graded papers or did another important task. While we may have felt that this was useful, in the end we learned something from it.
The same is true with SEO. While it is not mandatory to write an article, it is extremely helpful in helping us build credibility and page rank as the writer of any piece has to contend with millions of other people writing about the exact same thing. If you practice SEO from the beginning and lead a healthy keyword to rest-of-the-article ratio life then you will have no problem maintaining a good rank.
While many people have tried “tricks” similar to a fad diet, they have worked for a short period until they stopped using these tricks or the algorithms changed and their “trick” no longer works. Maintaining quality and consistent work the entire time you write online content will ensure that you are not tricking your readers or yourself into thinking you are the expert in a topic that you clearly know nothing about. This will become evident in your work once someone reads your material and finds that it is full of misinformation, incorrect keywords, and the same information as every other piece on the subject.
Many people that use these “secrets,” or “tricks,” are because they want an immediate profit gain. Weaning ourselves from these immediate gains and working toward maintaining a long-term profit gain and maintaining quality information so that your content is not wiped out overnight when everyone that used “tricks and secrets” has their websites wiped clean. Using SEO continuously will help you build authority in your subject as well as keep you ranked well on the search engine results pages as well. Often times, the biggest trick that is still in use that always sweeps bad content under the rug is over relevance. If you are the 7,985,225,475 person to write on maintaining an angora sweater, you will not rank highly in results if you even make it on the board at all.
Most writers will complain that SEO is hard. Well while that may be true, it is a lot more difficult to fix all the work that Penguin destroyed because you were taking the easy route. As your mom used to tell you when you were little; “If you do it right the first time, you won’t have to do it again.” Paying a few freelance writers to rewrite your original article several times over may be the easiest and cheapest solution; however, it is the wrong solution because it will not yield long-term results. If you are working for others, creating their websites and helping them to build their livelihoods, it will be a lot more difficult to explain to that client why their website is tanking and they are not making any money. It is especially more difficult to explain to them it is your fault for trying to use a shortcut. If you want to create good, quality content straight out of the gate, here are a few known SEO tactics you can employ.
1. Find the keywords that people search for products similar to yours and use them on your own site to promote your product or content. Do not over use the words so you sound insane, but use them a few times to get your point across. A general rule is once every hundred words.
2. Fix every page on your site. Make sure all the links work, there is no duplicate content, and that the article is grammatically correct and spelled correctly. This will increase your page views and your traffic significantly, simply knowing that all the information is valid and working properly.
3. Write unique content that people have not found on the internet yet. Providing fresh content will make readers come back to learn what you have to say as well as keep your blogs and websites closer to the top of the rankings because the content is fresh and not regurgitated information.
4. Link your content to high-ranking authority content instead of blogs or weak links when possible. Any time you can link your website to a professional journal, news reporting site, or something of the like. This will bring you better traffic as well as more interested readers.