Content & SEO Writing

Before you write a single word of your site, it is important to understand the ultimate goals of your writing. Obviously, you are building the site to try to refer sales on Amazon products to earn commissions, but you don't just want to build a complete site full of blatant product sales.

The entire concept behind my site building strategy is to build a useful and helpful website for consumers of a specific niche. The foremost goal is to educate the consumer to help to select the best product for their needs.

Think about this logically. There are a number of reasons why this approach works:

1. By helping and educating your site visitors, you are building trust with them in the only way that a simple website really can accomplish this goal. When you build that trust and help them out without asking for anything in return, people will buy. Obviously, not everyone is going to buy, but enough will to make it worth your while.
    
2. When you help your site visitors buy a product that is best of their particular needs, especially when they are educated about all of the important topics relating to the product, then those consumers are much more likely to be happy with their purchase. When they're happy, they don't return the product to Amazon, which means you don't lose your commissions to refunds. When Amazon refunds a consumer, they take back the commission paid on that sale too, so it can help a lot to avoid this problem.
    
3. When you accomplish #1, you will get good search engine rankings and be able to maintain them long-term. Ultimately, trying to trick search engines is a fruitless labor because they will figure it out sooner or later - especially since they actually use real people to rate their live results to weed out sites that are using spamming or other devious tactics to gain their rankings. Google wants websites that are useful for a specific topic, so why try to fight it? Just embrace this one simple fact and everything else follows in due time.

Try to always keep this in the back of your mind while you work on your site, especially when you are writing.

Writing Basics

Writing in general is something that actually scares a lot of people. The truth is that everyone can write - all you have to do is translate your spoken words into text.

Yes, you do want to try your best to avoid spelling and grammar errors, but you also don't have to obsess about it being perfect. As long as the information being your writing is sound and that information is easy to pick up from your writing, then everything will be fine.

One of the biggest writing mistakes is actually trying to get too fancy or complicated. Just take the facts and put them in your own words. You don't have to be an Amazon Shakespeare.

If you aren't comfortable with writing and don't have a lot of knowledge on a subject, you can actually just collect information from a wide variety of sources online and essentially rehash that information on your own site in a useful way that uses your own words.

Think of this like natural, manual article spinning. If you don't already know, article spinning is typically an automated method that takes writing and rewrites it (but usually does a really poor job rehashing it in a way that makes sense).

Here is a good practice example for you to try:

First, start with this sentence:

Down comforters keep you warm.

Now, try rewriting that sentence without reusing all of the same primary words: down, comforters, and warm. As long as the meaning is still basically the same but the words are different, you could reuse that sentence and still be unique.

Here are just a few quick examples I was able to come up with:

-Feather blankets are a great heat insulator.

-Bed covers with fuzzy, soft filling are perfect for use in the winter.

All these sentences use completely different primary words but still basically mean the same thing.

If you can get comfortable with simply rewriting sentences, you can easily create entire websites about any topic in the world by simply researching the information and putting it into your own words.

The other key to writing is trying to convey the information to your reader in a way that makes sense. If there is any way to organize the information, start there. I often start with a broad topic, and then proceed to get more specific as I write.

Writing Structure

Think of writing a website page like presenting a case in a court of law. Start by summarizing your topic and objective of your writing, then proceed to provide points to prove your objective and elaborate on your summary in more detail, and finally provide a conclusion.

You don't necessarily have to maintain a structure like this for everything that you write, but you may find it helpful to get started writing this way if you are not very comfortable with it or completely new to it.

Think back to grade school when you learned how to write essays or do a science experiment. Everything had a very methodical approach that often started with brainstorming. You can take this same tactic and apply it to help you with your writing too.

When you start to write on a particular topic, just begin by brainstorming all of the main points you want to talk about. Then, make a list of these points and try to organize them - much like I did when I was coming up with a list of topics to use for the pages of my website.

Once you have a list of organized points that you want to talk about for a particular topic, try to arrange them in an order that makes sense. If one point depends on the information for another point, be sure to present the dependent information first and follow up with the rest. This helps to ensure that people 

don't have to jump around in your writing to actually learn what you are trying to teach.

With your list of points arranged, you can simply elaborate on each point to create the body of your article. Then provide a summary / introduction before the body along with a conclusion after it.

One more thing worth mentioning is that you don't have to stick to plain sentence and paragraph writing. Think about the information you want to get across to your site visitors.

If you need to list a number of things, use an HTML list instead of trying to put that information into a series of sentences and/or paragraphs. There are tons of instances like this when simplicity really makes more sense. It is easier on you, it will look better on your live website to break up large areas of text, your site visitors will find it more engaging, and search engines will even love it.

Also try to think about instances where other types of content may work for a topic in addition to writing. You should always provide some writing along with each of the pages of your site, but you may also want to include pictures, audio, and/or video when it fits to do so. These types of content are definitely more engaging for your site visitors.

As long as you are writing some unique content of your own for each of your site pages, it is OK to go out on the internet to try to find additional content that you could use. A YouTube video is a great example of something like this - just embed an existing video along with your own unique content and perhaps an advertisement.

SEO Writing

There are tons of strategies out there on SEO writing and methods that people will recommend to use on your site to get better search rankings. However, I truly do not follow a specific format for my writing.

With each page that you build on your site, you'll obviously have a particular keyword phrase in mind that you want to target. The worst thing you can do is to overuse that keyword phrase on that page.

First, make sure you have researched your topic that you are writing about. With general knowledge and keyword phrases, most people could probably write an article about a topic while knowing nearly nothing about it. However, you'll find writing easier to do when you actually have decent knowledge on your subject matter.

When it comes to your content, Google doesn't want to see a particular keyword phrase repeated over and over again. They want to see a page that is ABOUT a particular keyword phrase.

Since I'm writing about down comforters, I will want to be sure to use relational keyword phrases without overusing those two words. This could be a long list of potential words like bedding, fill power, thread count, feathers, stitching, pillows, sleep, etc.

Beyond using plenty of relational words of your target keyword phrase, you want to be sure to write naturally. That means using plenty of general words that could be found in any given article. This basically just means that if you are simply listing keyword phrases and relational words, you're doing it wrong - they must be used within natural writing (how it would sound if you were talking about those keywords and relational words).

Keyword Density

Many first-time writers and even seasoned experts can find themselves using their target keywords too frequently in their writing.

If you're using your entire phrase in more than 3-5% of your content, you're easily treading into dangerous waters with keyword spam. However, these limits may not apply to individual words. For example, my target phrase is down comforter guide.

I definitely don't want to overuse that phrase, but if the word “down” is used a bit heavily in my content, that will be OK (and likely expected unless there are other words that could be used and mean the exact same thing).

If you find that you are using your target words too often, try to imply those words in your writing or simply replace them with synonyms (other words that mean the same thing).

For example, instead of saying “down comforter this...” and “down comforter that...”. I could use it at the beginning of a paragraph in the first sentence, and them simply refer to the “down comforter” as “it” in other sentences in the paragraph.

You really do not want to obsess with your keyword density as your are writing your content, but your definitely want to be confident that you aren't overdoing it before you publish your writing on your website.

WordPress users can use one of a variety of free plugins to help them check their keyword density.

One that I often use is called Keyword Statistics. Just search for it through Plugins -> Add New in the WordPress admin menu.

After you install the plugin, just look for it in the admin menu on the left:

First, visit the Metadata Delivery page. If you use SEO Ultimate, that plugin already handles a number of the things that Keyword Statistics will try to do, so we need to disable these things.

Under Serve meta informations for, deselect the check next to robots, description, and canonical - just leave keywords checked. Then click the Update button to save your changes.

Next, go to the Keyword Density Checker link in the admin menu for Keyword Statistics.

On this page, you can set the default language to use (if you are not building an English site).

Beyond the language selection, there are two other things that I want to do on this page:

1. In the Items in keyword lists drop-down box, select 10 instead of 5. This provides us with more keyword densities for our content.
    
2. Deselect the checkbox for Automatic Update. Without this, the editor page can lag if you have a decent amount of content on a single page. We'll simply update keyword densities manually from that page when we want to check them.

I didn't include Keyword Statistics in the initial plugin setup because I don't consider it to be an essential plugin for all of your sites. Once you've been writing content for a while, you may find that you don't need it anymore, but it can be very handy for beginners.

For this particular site, it isn't entirely useful because it actually strips out the word “down” as a stop word, and the plugin doesn't offer an easy way to edit those. You can still view keyword densities with stop words included, but most of them end up being real stop words like “the”.

To actually use this plugin, just look for the Keyword Statistics box in the WordPress page editor. Use the Update button to refresh the information. One word, two word and three word phrases, their counts and percentages are shown.

The main idea here is to simply ensure that you are not overusing your keywords, so make sure you have a variety of words showing up here, although your main words should still have a presence in these lists.

The Keywords text box will be automatically filled with your top used single word keywords, but I recommend unchecking the “use generated keywords” box and proving your own. You can use single words or multi word phrases. Split each phrase with a comma and do not provide too many (5-8 words/phrases total is a good max level).

The Title, Robots, and Description settings here will not actually do anything since we have disabled them in the plugin settings. With that said, don't bother spending time on them here (all of these things are controlled through SEO Ultimate instead).