3 Sure-Fire Ways to Ruin Your Content’s SEO Value

03 Dec 3 Sure-Fire Ways to Ruin Your Content’s SEO Value

Content writing is the name of the game when it comes to effective SEO and even social media strategies. Most businesses have caught onto this and are writing feverishly to make sure there is enough keyword enriched content on their web pages to ensure that they are being considered in the search engines for the terms they wish to rank for. Writing content with search engine optimization in mind is a lot of work. The content has to be unique, use keywords and interesting enough that users will take the time to read it.

Outsourcing content writing for your website is a natural choice if you have the resources to pay for a professional content writer, but if you don’t or just want to fight this beast on your own. We have compiled a list of the 3 sure-fire was to ruin your hard work and also the content SEO value.

1. Make your keywords fit unnaturally

One approach to writing content with keywords in mind is to write the content as you would normally with free flowing sentences and great writing abilities…. And then go back and replace certain words with the key terms you would like the content to write for. In some cases this will work if you are clever enough to make sure it flows just as well as when you originally wrote the piece. More often than not, this looks completely unnatural and anyone visiting your website will know what you are trying to do.

The best way to go about incorporating keywords into your content is to plan the sentences around the keywords, not try to fit the keywords into the sentence.  Remember, you are trying to please the user who is reading the content first, and the search engines second. Even if in your head you know you want this content to rank.

2. Use long paragraphs

Using long drawn out paragraphs is a great way to lose the interest of a potential new customer that is visiting your website. If you’re looking to kill your content’s SEO value, make sure you are doing this. If you want to go the other way and have it favorable for the search engines, break the content down. Making the content easier to ready will help the visitors to the website stay interested by being able to skim the content and being drawn in by the next point.

Bullet points, images, and paragraph headers are all great ways to break the content down into sections. This makes the content easier to read and the users will stay on the page longer.

3. Be careless with spelling and grammar

Please, please, please do this when trying to damage the SEO of your content. Businesses make the mistake of trying to please the search engines first. They make sure the content is long enough, and has the correct formula of keywords to help the pages rank, and that’s where the attention to the content stops. This is a great way to ruin user experience and the SEO value of your content.

On the internet people tend to get extremely frustrated when there is a spelling or grammar mistake. This will be the one thing they remember from your content – it was sloppily written.

At the end of the day, the lesson to be learned from this blog post is that if you want to kill the content on your website in the eyes of the search Engines, put the search engines first. When you are putting the search engines first you are not putting the users or visitors to your website first and the search engines are paying more attention than ever to user behavior. If the users on your site are bouncing off pages and spending little time on the site, this is a huge indication that these pages have low grade content, even if the keywords and length are technically correct.

If you are writing for the users while keeping search engine optimization value in mind, you’ll rank better. Simple as that!