How To Optimize On Page Content: A Writer’s Guide

Search engine optimization, more commonly known as SEO, is the process of improving a page or website’s online visibility in a search engine’s unpaid for results in an organic and natural fashion to increase the quality and quantity of online web traffic that is arriving at a website.

Basic SEO best practices are incredibly useful for freelance writers, journalists, bloggers, copywriters, technical writers, social media managers, and subject matter specialists by including keywords, links to other web pages, and writing copy that is effortless to read and informative to the reader.

SEO is definitely not a simple, paint-by-numbers walk in the park to put into practice without having some experienced advice to put you on the right path.

In order to cover some of the lesser-known nuances that can help you avoid creating errors that can lead to losing out on having your web pages properly optimized for increased internet traffic, we have assembled a list of on-page SEO best practices for the Content Writing experience that your website can easily benefit from to improve.

Don’t Overuse Keywords

Keyword stuffing might have been a cheat code back in the early days of search engine optimization.

But the search engines like Google have smartened up and can tell when a web page has taken way too many opportunities to load up the same keyword phrases countless times from paragraph to paragraph.

When using content writing to optimize your web page, context is incredibly important because search engines are only becoming smarter, with context and user engagement being placed above keyword frequency in terms of search engine ranking factors needed to land on that coveted first page of a Google search.

Do your audience a favor and make sure that you are provided quality content that is actually useful after they spent all of this time finding your page in the first place.

If you aren’t answering the questions that they clearly have asked in the form of keyword phrases in Google, you will have wasted their time and yours as well because you may have just rubbed a potential customer the wrong way.

User engagement is a major contributing factor in search rankings.

When you are in the process of picking keywords for the purpose of optimizing your web page content to increase the ability to be found online, focus on 1-2 specific keywords to target for your page and use long-tail phrases that are phrased in the way that your customers speak.

Locate effective keywords that you should factor into your writing content with helpful SEO tools such as Google Adwords, Google Trends, as well as Google Adwords Keyword Planner.

Internal Links and External Links

When you are using links to other web pages in your content writing strategies, use keywords in the anchor text, which is the clickable text with another page linked to it that is relevant to the site or page that you are linking to benefit the reader.

When you are using external links, sometimes called outbound links, avoid linking to trash websites that aren’t authoritative in their niche because Google and other search engines will judge you based on the sites that you link to.

Also, when you use internal links to spread your SEO ranking power out further, by linking to another page within your site, some of the ranking status gets passed along to the next page. Avoid adding an overabundance of links to a single page.

Test Your Page Speed

Google has figured out over time that the site speed, which is a sample of multiple page speeds on a site, is a factor that contributes to success or difficulty in the Google ranking algorithm.

Having a faster page speed has the added advantage of permitting search engines to crawl the pages on your website in a faster manner, which creates faster indexing and could lead to improved online search visibility as well, which all points towards users having a better experience on your website.

Use Google’s PageSpeed Tool to figure out the load time of your web page.

Compress any images on your page

There are free tools available to you, such as Tiny PNG, that will allow you to compress the size of your images before you even upload them onto any web pages.

Why is this a really big deal? Because large images can become problematic, inciting the slowing down of page speeds, even more so when there happen to be several high-resolution images on the same page.

Avoid having too many ads

Lastly, be aware of the fact that multimedia ads can really contribute to your web pages having slow loading speeds.

It is understandable if the media ads on your website are generating you some revenue.

Nut make sure that you balance out the advertising that is covering your web pages with the quality of the user experience that you are offering to consumers and make your content as accessible as possible.