I have been writing content for a living for over four years, and throughout that time I’ve watched the industry take a number of twists and turns. One of the primary things you need to keep in mind when you are in the business of search engine optimization is that things are always changing and you have to be willing and able to make adjustments.
Humility is key in every endeavor, and it is important to recognize that you don’t know it all when you are engaged in writing content for SEO, and even when you do for a fleeting moment, the situation will change before you know it. So, I like to work with the assumption that the people who are programming search engine algorithms are bright, they know what they’re doing, and they are always looking forward and trying to make improvements.
I was told back in the day that you need to identify keywords and phrases based on search volume and consciously stuff your content with these. There are many who still feel that this is true. Other say you should indeed use these pre-selected terms, but they toss out a metric, like “2% to 5%” is the “correct” keyword density. The fact is, they don’t know this for sure. But businesses always want to operate under a set of numerical absolutes, when in fact, none exist in many if not most instances.
There is a process called Latent Semantic Indexing that Google has been interested in for several years that I believe plays a big part in the future of search algorithms. LSI is basically a method of recognizing the subject matter of a body of text based on semantically related terms.
Smart people are going to be annoyed by an algorithm that encourages a lack of semantic elegance and rewards poorly written, keyword-stuffed content with positive SERPs. There has to be a better way, and I think that LSI is that better way.
So when I deliver content, I get a general idea of the relevant keywords and their search volume using SEO tools, but I keep them in the back of my mind and write naturally. I’ve done that throughout the writing of this post, and I bet that if you look back through it to see if there are relevant keywords winding through the text, you will find them. But none are overused because I am trying to write something that reads well that is intended to convey my thoughts on this topic clearly and concisely. So I am at once writing compelling and useful content while inadvertently, as it were, using a hefty number of key terms and phrases.
When you think about, content that is clearly written around keywords is not going to convert even if it helps a site place well in the SERPs. People will click, say “yuck, spam,” and move one. Content has a dual purpose–optimization coupled with genuinely useful and compelling information that leads to conversions. We learn and adjust day by day, but we feel as though we have an advanced understanding of quality content creation and endeavor to provide our clients with the best of both worlds.
