Written by Karis Leung
As Communications graduates, most people would be pretty confident about their blog writing skills. Depending on the individual, one might even be confident about writing content for marketing purposes for different brands. All is well and good if your content is engaging, but for a specific marketing tool such as Search Engine Optimisation, you need specific frameworks. Commit these tips to memory and the SEO team you hand your articles off to will absolutely adore you.
Key words
Key words are essential to SEO processes. When given a brief by your boss on what articles or blog posts to write, take note of the keywords your boss wants you to use. This keyword / key phrase will be provided by the SEO team, whom have a table that shows how certain phrases are tracking on
different search engines. Your job is to make sure that key word or key phrase is in that article at least once every 100 words. Have the key word in your first sentence, and last paragraph. Keep your keywords in mind while you’re writing instead of trying to cram it in afterwards. This will make your life a lot easier.
Headings and subheadings
Your big title is the Heading of your article or blog post. In SEO terms, that’s your H1. Your H1 must include you’re designated key word and be short and sweet, no more than 12 words. This will mean the SEO team can easily manipulate and optimise your article. The subtitle of your piece is your H3, and must include the name of the brand you are promoting, as well as the keyword. Have I mentioned how important the keyword is?
Hyperlinking
Easy way to make your SEO optimiser happy is to have correct hyperlinks. By linking everything in your article with the handy hyperlinking tool in Microsoft Word, the optimiser can copy and paste everything into the website. A good rule of thumb is to double check the link by clicking through yourself afterwards by control-clicking the link in your article.
Style guide
This one’s an easy one once you get the hang of it, but it may be a bit tricky when you first start off. Your company or organisation should have a branding style guide of some sort in regards to writing style, fonts, and photo quality. Whether it’s the pixel dimensions of photos, photo subjects, number of photos required per post, or writing tone, it’s important to follow it to a tee to make life easier for everyone. Consult the style guide always, and if there isn’t one for you organisation, you might want to propose one to your boss.
Word count
Now this one is a bit tricky, because word count differs significantly depending on your target audience. Good rule of thumb is that you start losing people at 500 words.
So with all that said, the best way of all to make your SEO optimiser’s life easier, is to keep to these rules, and communicate with them to make sure you know how they work best.