Jan has challenged me to write a guest post on the best SEO practices for bloggers who are into creative writing. This could be complicated so I will use a more general approach. Before I begin, let me thank Jan for giving me this opportunity to guest post for his blog.
Let us start first by trying to understand why people want to rank well on search engines. There is a general perception that when your site ranks high in search engine results, there’s a strong case for “implied endorsement.” With organic SEO, the user will likely believe in the ability of the search engine indexing to deliver relevant results. Therefore, if a search engine ranks your site as relevant you must be a leader, an expert, or highly reputable in your field.
Creative writing and SEO
As a general rule, people do SEO because they have specific objectives. Some of these objectives can be, but are not limited to:
- Site monetization
- Branding
- Increasing your readers base
- Marketing and promotion
- Or all of the above
Regardless of what your motivation is, SEO is SEO. You will have to follow certain and minimal criteria to get your pages up there. It does not matter if the purpose of your writing is about expressing your thoughts, feelings or anything else within this line of thinking. There are common rules that you must implement if you want to rank well.
Proper use of keywords in creative blogs
Let me give you an example, and please note that this is purely on a SEO perspective. I will use Elmot’s recent blog post for this. “PinoySoundingBoard Sings Jai Ho!“ Now let us tackle this one for a moment. People search for keywords or terms. With all due respect, do you think that someone will actually look for this term on a search engine? Maybe not.
Now, what about “creative writing” or “poetry”? Take for example the keyword “poetry,” which returns well over 100 million results on Google. How’s that for competition? Now we can narrow this down to say, love poems. We can go deeper with short love poems. Even deeper with short love poems for him/her. I think you get the picture.
Here’s an one example of a keyword I optimized for in my blog. What do you think of Google Affiliate Program as a keyword? Go ahead and google this term – you do not even have to use the quotes. Of almost 18 million results, you should see me there on the first page hanging within the 3rd or 4th place, right under Google’s own website. How’s that for SEO? Proper use of keywords is what I am trying to tell you here and I am not even using WordPress which is excellent for SEO.
Best SEO ranking factors for creative writers
So with this in mind, the best advice I can give bloggers who are into creative writing are the following:
- Keyword usage – anywhere in the title tag, and on internal or external links (anchor text) – do not worry too much about keyword density and keywords on images as they are of minimal importance (although it does not hurt if you use them). Use keyword research tools if possible before writing your post (there are many out there).
- Link building – Try to get as much quality backlinks as possible. You can achieve this by guest posting to blogs within your same niche or by commenting meaningfully where eventually people will link to you.
- Post – uniqueness of the content on a page, recency of page creation, historical content changes (get those comments pumping in)
- Sitewide – site architecture needs to be intelligent and easy for users to navigate. There are other white hat link building tactics that you can deploy, but the best are those that I have mentioned here.
You need to watch out for also for negative ranking factors that can negate your SEO efforts. Avoid these things at all cost -
- Cloaking links
- Link acquisition from known link farms
- Links pointing to banned domain names.
- Frequent server downtime and site inaccessibility (choose a good host)
There you have it – your basic SEO practices for creative writers. At the end of the day, and as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, SEO is SEO and there is unfortunately no way around it.
About the Author: Ditesco is the blog owner of IBlogZone where he made his mark as internet business entrepreneur. Please check out his blog – a resource laden site in internet marketing, SEO, and anything related to cutting edge trends in blogging. For starters, you might find these articles useful: The most important SEO factors and Three- step guide to simple SEO writing.
Photo Credit: Wikipedia
Related Resources:
- Readers vs Bots – Making Everyone Happy
- Improve Blog SEO with Internal Linking Structure
- Content Optimization Checklist for Human Readers and SEO
- The Necessity of Starting with Keywords
