I am going to visit one of our local clients today to do an SEO training course for their content team. It's really a good idea for an business to augment their SEO campaign with some in house training for all Web associates. The thing is, SEO affects every facet of your Web site and often times, your Web strategy. So when you align all stakeholders in a common vision as it relates to SEO, you significantly increase your chances for success.
Content writers without SEO experience, often write with too many assumptions that the audience is familiar with their content, industry jargon, etc. So its a good game plan to expose those people to some of the methods that search engines use to rank content. That way they can incorporate those SEO nuances into their culture of writing.
Two specific examples of this come to mind. The first one is a long standing joke on my SEO team that for some reason software companies never use the word software in their content. We have had a number of software companies that we have helped. And in each of those cases, one of our recommendations was to increase the number of times that they used the word software in content and meta data. Often times we forget that despite advances in latent semantic indexing, Google does not inherently know that words are related. For example, that AutoCAD is software.
The second example of SEO methods that should be incorporated into the culture of writing content is to expand on pronouns. So lets look at the following sentences:
"Our database software is really cool. It lets me track sales in real time."
(incidentally, this sentence was not taken from one of our clients..lol)
But these sentences could be changed to:
"Our database management software, Brand X, is really cool. The advanced features of this data warehousing program let me track sales in real time."
So the second sentence is a little longer but gives additional keyword focus to:
"data warehousing", "data warehousing program" and "database management software" as well as other valuable permutations of those phrases. So in the first sentence, we just added another adjective. In the second sentence we replaced a pronoun with a noun and a prepositional phrase (I swear I haven't used the term since high school..lol). But the end result is adding a lot more keywords to the content and conveying more specific information to the user. It's a win win. Just make sure you always focus on enhancing content in such a way as to always benefit the user by giving more detail. That's a KEY point in this process.
So the point is, getting everyone in your organization on the same page in terms of your approach to SEO is critical for success. And as it relates to content writers, the ideas of writing as if the person had no idea of what your content was about and the idea of expanding on pronouns can be very effective for SEO. Gotta go, have a great day!
