How to Write SEO Optimized Content for Your Company’s Website

0

## Introduction

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It’s the process of optimizing your website so that it ranks higher in the search results for keywords related to your products and services.

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to write SEO optimized content for your company’s website. You’ll learn:

– What SEO is and why it’s important

– How to write content that ranks well in search engines

– Tips for writing content that’s optimized for SEO

## What Is SEO and Why Is It Important?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of improving the visibility of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs). In other words, it’s a way to get more people to find your website when they search for your products or services on a search engine like Google, Bing, or Yahoo!

The goal of SEO is to increase the number of visitors to your website by making your website more visible to the search engines. The higher your website ranks in the SERPs, the more likely it is that people will click on your website and visit it. This means that your website will get more traffic, which in turn means that you’ll get more leads and sales.

In addition to improving your website’s visibility in search results, SEO can also help your website rank higher for specific keywords. For example, if you’re a plumber and you want to rank for the keyword “plumber” in Google, you can optimize your website for that keyword. This will make your website appear higher in Google’s search results when someone searches for that term. If you’re interested in learning more about SEO, check out our book, Search Engine Optimization All-in-One For Dummies(Wiley).

It’s important to understand that SEO is not a one-size-fits-all approach. You can’t optimize a website for one keyword and expect it to rank well for other keywords. You need to optimize your site for a specific keyword or set of keywords that are relevant to your business. This way, when people search for those keywords, they’ll be more likely to visit your website, and you’ll have a better chance of converting them into leads and customers. For more information about how to choose the right keywords for your business, see the section “How to Choose the Right Keywords for Your Business,” later in this chapter. For now, just know that you need to do some keyword research before you start optimizing your site. You also need to make sure that the content you’re writing is optimized for the keywords you’re targeting. You don’t want to waste your time and money writing content for keywords that won’t get you any traffic or leads. For tips on how to conduct keyword research, see our book Keyword Research: The Complete Resource for Finding High-Paying Keywords and Discovering Your Competitors’ Best-Selling Products and Services(John Wiley & Sons, Inc.), which you can find at `www.dummies.com/go/keywordresearch`.

If you don’t know what keywords you should be targeting, we recommend that you start with a free keyword research tool, such as Google’s Keyword Planner. You can use this tool to see what keywords your competitors are ranking for and which keywords people are most likely to search for when they’re looking for your type of product or service. This information will help you determine which keywords to target for your own website. For a step-by-step walkthrough of how to use Google’s keyword planner tool, see Google’s video tutorial. You can also check out this video tutorial on YouTube.

## Write Content That’s Optimized for SEO

Before you start writing your website content, make sure you understand the basics of SEO. In this section, we’ll walk you through the basic concepts of SEO and show you how you can use those concepts to write high-quality, SEO-optimized content. We’ll also show you some of the best practices for writing SEO-friendly content, including how to avoid common SEO mistakes and how to make your content easy to read and understand for both human readers and search engine bots.

Note: In this book, we use the term search engineto refer to both search engines like Google and Bing, as well as search engine crawlers, which are the programs that crawl the web and index web pages for search engines to index. We use the terms botand crawlerinterchangeably to mean the same thing: a program that searches the web for content and indexes that content for search engine indexing. We don’t use the word spider, which is the name of the program that actually does the crawling and indexing of the web. We also don’t differentiate between the different types of search engines, which include Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and others. We assume that you’re familiar with these search engines and how they work. If not, you may want to check out the resources at the end of this chapter to learn more about search engine optimization.