Content Writing for SEO: Guaranteed to Attract Readers

Substantial content pieces that are 300 words long or more. In the field of creative writing, there are all kinds of schemes, patterns, syntagmas, and structures to fit one’s writing in. The waters are divided when it comes to using a clutch like that to write, but that is in the field of creative writing only.

In writing that is commercial, promotional, and advertising it’s a very different story. Content that is used as a commercial tool is much, much more scientific than any creative writing.

Templates exist, and for a reason. They are the distilled wisdom of years of research and experimentation. Templates show how content has to be created to be effective and elicit the desired response from the reader.

They are also crutches on which to find support when you are starting. The ideal is that after repeating many types a type of content the structure of that particular type will sink in and you won’t be needing the actual template file to write the content.

Traditionally, the shortest content length that deserves to be called a blog post is 300 words. No tool that gauges articles will give points for articles that are below the 600 words mark.

Moreover, some of the tools won’t give considerable points to a piece of content as long as it stays below the 1000 words mark. Also, 300 words are way too near the maximum words a micro-blog should be, and that’s maybe why search engines see content this short as thin content.

I don’t know a lot about how the software that analyzes content for quality works. One thing I suspect, though, is that they are structured to please search engines. Sadly, to please a search engine an article has to follow strict guidelines, with the number of words one of the most important.

I would put the bare minimum at seven-hundred words because I feel that with less than that it is extremely hard to carry a point across. But that’s just me because I’m a writer.

Other persons, with more developed skills in other departments, like design and photography would probably think that by smart use of other elements content of around three hundred words is enough.

If we take the search engines out of the picture, then I don’t see why, a page with written content that is around 300 words, is approached at the research phase like any other article, and that doesn’t see itself as simply copy, shouldn’t be honored with the name of blog post or article.

 

Research for Content Writing

All valuable, original content starts with world-class research. You can’t possibly write good, original content after reading four or five web pages that you obtained through web searches. You can’t call that research.

I don’t mean to devalue the web, but the research data one generally requires for a good piece of content should be approached not by a single method but by a sequence of attacks that cover as many information-gathering avenues as possible.

Websites, libraries (both brick-and-mortar and virtual), journals, papers, studies, videos, podcasts, q-a portals, interviews, books. 

The most information obtained through any, and all, of these channels you can feed to your research document before you even start to write the piece, the better.

Content writing isn’t creative writing. Creative writing is an industry in which you can get away with minimal research and use the “writing about what you know” method indefinitely.

I don’t see creative content as lowbrow as, say, gobbledygook content, but I see creative writing as nearer to gobbledygook than to the kind of content a copywriter would write. Because when you’re in the business of delivering actionable, high-value content, of which the main objective is to persuade and make the reader act, to write from experience gets old very fast.

On this line of thought, let’s not get into the subject of writing fluff, something that is even worse on creative writing, but in value-based content pieces, it is a downright mortal sin.

Fluff is the death knell of a contemporary, digital, rich content piece. Readers see through it at once, and if said fluff is based on ego, boasting or generalizations and hyperbole, then you have a piece of annoying trash instead of content or copy. You should never write such kind of content that is surely going to put off (or even enrage) your reader. 

Structure

It’s a well-known fact that masters of different arts, all metaphysical considerations aside, have something in common when it comes to the masterful execution of their pieces.

First, they master the methods and rules of their particular art forms and disciplines, and then they offset the structural commonalities of the method through their takes on rule-breaking and stylistic deviations from the method. The same result can be obtained when writing copy and content.

I don’t know much about rule-breaking when writing content, because I generally try to adhere strictly to proven content structures and style rules.

It’s a very well-known fact that when you have to write constrained by a structure the writing is all the more effective, alive, and powerful. What may seem like a restrictive scheme to outsiders, is a very powerful tool to write for those who can maintain a good flow of both imagination and mental organization of owned and earned sets of knowledge.

On this website, there are categories of examples. If you compare two examples of the same type of content you’ll notice that the content itself is different, but that the structure is practically identical.

That’s because there’s a template for each kind of content that is advisable to (almost) always follow. The structure of a piece of content should be drafted starting from the established template, and, if you know what you’re doing, then bending or breaking a few rules here and there.

Generally, the structure of a content template differentiates itself by the sections it must have and how long each section has to be.

Word Count

The words count of an article is another variable that, like structure, constrains the writer and at the same time forces her to write the content in a much more economical and effective way.

The negative side of word count would be someone that runs out of research assets before reaching the word count and then adds fluff that ends up taking up, say, 15% of the article.

In a case like that, I would rather finish an article with a missing portion of the content, rather than letting it have a percentage of fluff that I added to reach a word count.

Style

Style in copywriting and content writing has a relatively different meaning than the styles of painting, sculpture, poetry, or music.

For content writing, style means to follow the rules and regulations of a certain guide. Two of the most famous industrial style guides are The Chicago Manual of Style and the Associated Press Stylebook.

Voice

The voice a writer uses on a piece of content is the composite of all the qualities of his writing adapted to a determined piece. It’s conditioned by the subject, market, audience, and channel in which the piece will be featured.

The voice is a combination of the different qualities for each of the composition’s elements. The voice always is subordinated to the subject matter, topics, and themes that pertain to the piece at hand. The voice that a content writer picks, its tone, and all the other qualities, have to be an excellent fit for all the variables involved in delivering it.

Some of the context’s variables that determine the voice to use: 

Audience
Market
Channel
Medium

This simply means that the voice is one of the main focuses when writing content because it must match the context and gel with it seamlessly.

 

Technical Writing Resources

Examples and templates of technical and industrial content. Even if you have to research heavily to write good technical content, it doesn’t mean that you need to fill the content with jargon and pseudo-scientific filler.

The rules of good content writing apply to technical content, you must keep the jargon to essentials, while still keeping the information accurate and understandable to both technical and laymen audiences.

Technical White Paper

Technical white papers are educational articles dealing with the guidelines and protocols of something while the technical blue papers focus on the technical side of something in a scientific or pseudo-scientific way.

A rough template of a technical white paper would be a document, 3000 to 5000 words in length, covering different aspects of a technical topic. Examples of the sections could be context, tests, tables, surveys, charts, data, conclusions, acknowledgments, and bibliography.

Technical Blue Paper

A technical blue paper is an informative technical piece of content aimed at potential investors in a business venture. It can be a document under ten pages in length, detailing all the technical aspects of a business: how it works, its features, scale specifications, etc.

Investment Proposal

An investment proposal is a document detailing all the aspects of a business project yet to be implemented. It is another of the tools that are used to attract capital for a new product or service. All the aspects of the business must be included, even if in seed form only. Elements that a proposal must have include: 

Problem
Solution
Profit Estimates
Costs

 

Letter Writing Resources

Even if the task looks easy, writing a sales letter is a very technical task. There are a lot of skills that go into making an interesting, persuasive, effective, and actionable letter.

The secret to achieving such a letter lies in appealing to the emotions instead of appealing to the intellect.

It’s not enough to arouse someone’s attention with something new, you have to create interest with a message that appeals directly to the reader and her needs.

Coming from a generalist camp, I know that either you are an expert sales letter writer, or you are a generalist that can handle all the moving parts of the letter’s composition.

It pays to be a generalist when you need to write a sales letter, because, as with most all persuasive copywriting, you need a solid base in a few skills that aren’t obvious for a copywriter.

Sales psychology, content sequencing, how to integrate benefits and offers into the letter’s copy, and how to place the call-to-action elements in the right places of the letter are just a few of the skills you need to write a converting sales letter.

In the psychological department or sales letter writing, for instance, there are four broad types of personality: 

Driver
Amiable
Expressive
Analytical 

For your sales letter to click with all four personalities, it has to have triggers for all of them in at least four different sentences of its content.

 

Classic Example: Robert Collier’s Six Essentials

 In the lengthy book The Robert Collier Letter Book, there’s a template that he gives that can be resumed to:

1. The Opening: piggybacks into the readers' attention 

2. The Explanation: outlines the features of the product or service

3. The Reason: makes the readers want the benefits of the offering

4. The Proof: backs the statements and creates confidence in the readers

5. The Snapper: pushes the readers to act, and creates a feeling that the readers will suffer the consequences if they don’t

6. The Close: explains what to do and how to the readers, for them to act right then and there

However, Collier is very explicit when he says that the template is just the start. That you also don’t need to sequence them in the strict order of the template, but each stage needs to be in every letter anyway.

 

Letter Writing to Elicit Emotional Responses

Like the trick of triggering the four personality types, Robert Collier tells you that you also have to appeal to the six prime motives of human action when writing letters. 

1. Love: always the strongest motive, but the one of the most difficult to work into letters

2. Gain: worked to death, but easy to appeal to it

3. Duty: to home and family, to country

4. Pride: inducements that touch the customer’s vision of herself. Personal need for praise.

5. Self-Indulgence: not to be overdone, but to spice copy that to at least one other motive

6. Self-Preservation: a primal human emotion 

Website Content Resources

 Custom-made content pieces to populate your website or publication. These are lengthy pieces that go beyond the parameters of what can be called copy.

Even if they require a copy, they are a more elaborate product that can stand on its own.

A lot of time goes into creating these pieces, even blog posts, traditionally from 600 to 1000 words, which may seem like a kind of throw-away content.

These pieces have different moving parts, starting with the research you do before you write them. Not everyone has the good fortune of writing about what one loves and knows.

I count myself among those who don’t. For those of us who have to write for others asking us to write about unknown things, research is a pre-requisite.

You can’t write any good, original long content about a subject you don’t know anything about if you don’t dully research the subject before sitting to write the content.

It sounds silly to make such an observation but it seems to me that instead of doing things the hard way and creating real value, a lot of content on the web is stolen, parroted, ripped-off spun, or otherwise cannibalized content.

This is very evident when you search for a definition for something that there is not much information about.

You read a definition, then go to another site and it has practically the same definition with a few things changed, you decide to go to another website and you find the same. This is extremely disappointing. Don’t be the guy that makes searchers lose their precious time.

On this section of the website, you will find everything related to website content. From guides, and how-tos, to templates and examples.

 

Website Content Benefits from SEO

If you write mostly for websites, you have learned by now that SEO techniques are very important, and you have streamlined those techniques into your content creation process.

Writing an article for a web page, and splicing SEO techniques into it after you finished writing the piece is not ideal. It can be done, but you should strive for making SEO techniques second nature to your writing, not as something that comes later, in the polishing or correcting phases.

Not integrating SEO techniques in the content creation workflow has many disadvantages.

Having to splice in SEO techniques after the article is finished takes more time than writing SEO content from the start
It may distort the content and make it not as effective as it was before
As it’s something that is added after the content creation process, the resulting content may sound unnatural
The changes may hit hard the coherence or logic of the content