As an obedient student of online marketing, you have been creating content for your websites, trying to please the teacher, that is, Google. However, after recent updates, it seems that pleasing the master just got a bit more difficult!
Google Panda update and SEO articles
In February 2011, Google introduced the Google Panda update with the intention of improving the quality of search results. As a result, many sites with a lot of ads and low-quality content began to fade. They were replaced by quality content-based sites, social media sites, news sites, etc. In this way, Google gave an indication that previously used SEO content writing techniques, including keyword stuffing, spinning, etc., were out of the window. If you want to achieve good SERPs, you need to create SEO articles that are meaningful and don’t have to be too “salesy.”
So what do you do to create effective articles that will please the search engines?
Keyword group based content
For starters, forget about creating content based on a single keyword. Now, you need to focus on a group of related keywords. Since you can’t have SEO articles on a single keyword that is highlighted throughout, you have to work with synonyms and other related keywords as well.
Write for your readers
Make the writing style more natural and less forced. This implies that you must write for the readers and not for the search engines. When you keep the readers in mind while creating the content, you are sure to get a reaction from the readers which would mean better visibility for your articles and also more sharing. These activities can help your content gain visibility and achieve higher SERPs.
Avoid excessive links
When you want to link a certain article to another page on your website, you need to place anchor text links in various parts of the article. This is definitely a good activity, but don’t overdo it. Overlinking just to try and improve SEO will do no good.
Maintain the length of your content
Many websites have several short pages created with content between 150 and 300 words, but that will no longer help. Google has found that many webmasters used this technique to create various SEO articles and keyword-based pages in order to try to move up the Google SERPs. To counter this, Google now gives more credit to content that is at least 400-500 words long and may have enough information to keep readers interested.
You can easily follow the steps outlined above and see the difference in their SERPs. Most of these techniques are basic fundamentals for good SEO content writing that should have been followed even before the Google Panda update, but if they weren’t, now is the time to do it!