Tag: writing

  • How to improve the readability & SEO of your posts

    If your posts are easy for people to read and understand, they’re also easier for search engines to analyze and rank.

    That means good writing and formatting = great SEO.

    In a sense, search engines look at your page like a human visitor does: they both want to figure out what’s the most relevant information on the page.

    To improve the readability of your posts and improve SEO at the same time, you need to start with good writing.

    Writing Well for Websites

    Start by:

    Writing for clarity and persuasion …

    1. Grab the reader with the first sentence.

    2. Remove unnecessary words.

    3. Keep things simple (write for a grade 8).

    4. Short sentences are better.

    5. Active voice is easier to process than passive.

    A Shane Parrish tweet summarizing Scott Adams’ blog post, The Day You Became A Better Writer from The Dilbert Blog.

    A few more writing tips to make your writing more compelling and accessible:

    • Write short paragraphs comprised of one or two short sentences. This breaks up the text, making it easier to read on screen.
    • Avoid formal or jargon-laden language. Not everyone who comes to your site has a degree in the field. In fact, some people who visit your site may not even be experts! Don’t scare them off with dense language that only makes sense to insiders.
    • Write like you’re explaining something to a friend in a casual conversation. You’re not going to say “therefore, in conclusion…” to someone in conversation, so don’t add that to your web pages, either.
    • It’s better to be passionate and opinionated than “objective.” Let’s be honest, no one is truly objective. Unless you’re writing for a newspaper that insists on giving both sides of a story, make it clear where you stand and what you think. You’ll find this improves your writing, too.
    • Be specific: good writing is concise and detailed. Avoid vague abstractions or broad generalizations. To help your reader understand, give an example.
    • Stay focused on your main idea and topic: Each sentence on your page should explain one idea only, and each page should focus on one topic. If you want to express two separate ideas, use two separate sentences. If you want to explore more than one topic, write more than one post.

    Layout for Web Pages

    The words you write matter, but so does the way you format them on the web page.

    That’s because search engines like Google analyze your web pages to find clues about which words on your page are most important.

    Google uses formatting as one of the factors in determining how relevant a word or phrase is to the content of your page.

    Fortunately, these text formats also make your web page easier to read:

    • Use lots of headings! Headings break up your text and tell a reader where to find the information they’re looking for in your page. Bonus SEO tip: incorporate keywords into your headings).
    • Use bold type to call attention to important words or phrases. Avoid italics, which can be difficult to read on a screen, especially for long passages of text.
    • Use numbered and bulleted lists. Pro tip: highlight the important phrases in each list item to make the list even easier to scan (and easier for Google to analyze).
    • Add graphics and photos with compelling, informative captions and alt text. Everyone loves to look at pictures. A well chosen image can draw attention to a section of your writing, and the image’s caption stands out from the rest of the text. Google thinks that words in captions and the image alt tag are extra relevant, too. Pro tip: search for freely available images covered by a Creative Commons license to find relevant photos and images for your posts.

    Use Hyperlinks

    Hyperlinks to other posts on your site (internal hyperlinks) and to posts on other websites (external or outbound links) improve readability and SEO:

    • Links to other sources that reinforce the ideas in your writing add credibility to your posts.
    • Links to other, related posts in your site help search engines find and analyze related content on your site.
    • Because hyperlinks are colored and formatted differently than other text, they naturally stand out from the rest of the text on a page.
    • If your page contains lots of useful hyperlinks to other relevant web pages related to the subject, visitors will want to save or share the page as a valuable resource.

    Google also looks closely at the words in the hyperlink to evaluate the relevance of your page for search rankings.

    Pro Tip: if your hyperlink points to an external website (an outbound link), set the link to open the external page in a new browser tab.

    Edit your writing

    “Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.”

    John Updike

    To make your writing clear and persuasive, you need to edit. Make that part of your writing process. Go back and check what you’ve written, looking for ways to pare down excessive verbiage.

    Ask someone else to read what you’ve written, and edit your writing.

    Collaborative writing tools like Google Docs can help with this part of the writing process.

    But, you can also publish a post to your site and then send out links to the new post to ask for feedback.

    You can always go back and improve a web page after you’ve published it.

    Ask your readers for comments, too!

    Use checklists to improve the quality and consistency of your writing

    Refer to this article as a way check through your writing and to ensure you’re doing everything you can to make your post easy to understand and read online.

    You can also use this Essential blog post checklist for WordPress: 7 Steps to improve traffic and SEO, to improve the SEO performance of your posts, even if you aren’t using WordPress.

  • Publish every day to send a flood of traffic to your site

    You want more traffic to your site. But no one knows your site even exists. What do you do to drive more traffic to your site? You can pay for traffic by running ads, or you can use content marketing to send organic search engine traffic to your site.

    Organic traffic is free, once you’ve spent the time it takes to create and promote the content. Paid traffic also requires your time to create content and promote it, but you have to pay for all of your traffic. Over time, free organic traffic will start to add up, from a trickle to a flood.

    How to create your content creation machine

    In his detailed and long (~6,850 words) post, How To Publish Like A Huge Content Creation Team (When It’s Really Just You), Niklas Goeke describes the process he used to:

    grow Four Minute Books to almost 30,000 visitors, 837 email subscribers, and a cool $736.00 in affiliate commissions in just 60 days.

    The key elements of his approach:

    Set clear goals and validate

    Because his approach is very labor intensive, it’s important to know that what you’re working on will pay off when you start getting traffic.

    • First, figure out why you want traffic (probably, money) and how you’ll make money.
    • Validate your idea before you start creating content.
    • Calculate how much you’ll need to sell each month to reach your financial goal.

    Build a system to streamline content creation, publishing and promotion

    If you want to succeed at publishing new content every day, you need a clear process, an “assembly line,” that will reliably result in a good post or article, without having to reinvent the wheel each time you start.

    This approach also happens to be a great way to learn about any subject, especially how it’s presented online.

    Plan and structure your posts ahead of time

    1. Use the “1-in-1-out” system to generate new posts: pick one piece of content — another blog post, a YouTube video, a question on Quora, an infographic on Pinterest — as the basis for your post. Write a summary, or a rebuttal, or your interpretation of the item. Spend a half hour reading or watching the original content (the input), and then spend a half hour writing about it (the output): 1-in-1-out.
    2. Plan at least one month’s worth of posts, and write your headlines, in advance. Use a spreadsheet to organize your post ideas.
    3. Create an “evergreen” structure for your blog posts — “a way to outline your blog posts that you can use over and over again” to ensure that you include the valuable elements that you need in each of your blog posts, without having to think about it.
    4. Include a “signature” graphic near the top of your post.
    5. Shoot for “roughly 1,000 words per post” — longer than a blurb or listicle, but shorter than the long form guides that take a long time to write.

    Perform basic SEO and keyword research

    Because of the volume of material you’ll be publishing, you don’t have to implement an elaborate SEO strategy.

    1. Perform simple SEO to identify basic keywords, and then tune up your headlines with the limited set of keywords you’ve identified.
    2. Check search volume on the Google keyword planner for your basic list of keywords.
    3. Check Google auto complete for any of your keywords that don’t show any search volume.
    4. Integrate your keywords into your content structure in a handful of critical places: the title or headline, slug, a couple times in the body text, maybe in a header, in the alt tag of your signature picture, and in your meta description (excerpt)
    5. Use Yoast in WordPress to make this easy.
    6. Overcome any deficiencies in your SEO by publishing a huge volume of blog posts.

    Collect emails

    It’s critical to collect emails. Use these three tools from Sumo:

    • Welcome Mat: display a simple pop-up with a simple giveaway to gather emails when visitors arrive at your site.
    • List Builder: show another pop-up when your visitors are about to leave your site. The Wait But Why popup is a great example.
    • Scroll Box: this pop-up appears when visitors scroll down the page.
    • Focus on making the text copy displayed in these pop-ups as convincing and humorous as possible.

    Promote

    Spend 10 – 15 minutes in a handful of channels, right after publishing, to promote each and every post you publish.

    Here’s what Niklas uses for his blog:

    • Submit to StumbleUpon
    • Submit to Hacker News
    • Post to relevant Slack groups
    • Send post to 1 person via email
    • Tweet at input creator
    • Buffer tweets
    • Check in on coach.me (or another community you’re a part of)

    Other options he mentions include returning to the content that you used as the inspiration for your “1-in-1-out” post:

    • Write a comment to the YouTube video you originally watched with a link to your posted response.
    • Republish your article as the answer to the Quora question that you wrote.
    • Respond to the Medium article.

    Once you develop your promotional checklist, which will be different for your audience, especially if it includes posts to online communities that are focused on the subject you’re posting about, save your checklist. Use a tool like Buffer to automate your promotional posts, tweets, and other social media outreach.

    Publish every day

    Now that you’ve built the machine, and tested it out, it’s time to go to full production mode:

    Read, learn, write repeat. The reason this system works so well is because you don’t have to think. In order to keep it that way, I suggest you create a rigid structure for your daily writing and stick to it like a monk to his monastery.

    Some tips to make your writing easier and more efficient:

    • Write at the same time every day. Put this on your calendar and stick to it.
    • Use the Pomodoro Technique to structure your “1-in-1-out” blog post production system. Use a 25 minute Pomodoro segment to read or view your input content, take a five minute break, then use another 25 minute segment to write your blog post. Then publish.

    This whole process should take about an hour and a half, once you’ve set up the machine and run through it a few times. If you do that every day for 30 days, that’s 45 hours out of your month.

    What’s great about this approach

    Although the original article didn’t discuss these benefits, there are other benefits to this kind of content marketing:

    • Learn about a subject. You’ll read, watch and review an enormous amount of material on the subject you’re positing about, and writing about it will help you master the material. Within a month or two, you’ll be an expert.
    • Develop ideas for information products, like online courses, videos, podcasts, or ebooks. You can sell or promote these new information products to your audience (you have lots of visitors and email addresses, if you’ve followed these steps) which will lead to more sources of income and more traffic.
    • Master the practice of publishing daily. If you are agonizing over your posts and find it difficult to press the publish button, this is a way to teach yourself how to write and publish, without getting hung up on trying to perfect what you’re writing.
    • Improve your writing. Writing every day will help you become a much better writer, especially because you’re publishing your work, and ideally getting feedback from your audience.

    I wrote post you’re reading now using the principles and guidance of the method in How To Publish Like A Huge Content Creation Team (When It’s Really Just You.

    This post is a mere 1300 words or so, where the original post is more than five times longer, at 6,850 words. That’s partly because the original post includes lots of valuable examples and links to other resources.

    If this post is helpful to you, I’d recommend reading the original article, and then get after it! Try it out. Learn something new while you build traffic to your site.