How to Develop Content that Ranks Well
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Writing content for an online audience is a thing today. After all, people seem to do most of their most important tasks online. They transact with their banks through online platforms. They look for professionals to hire through online listings. They even order food via online applications!
If you want to make it big in the virtual arena, especially in topics that already have a lot of content such as Apple computers and how to take care of them, it’s not enough to write with passion. It’s not even enough to make your content fun and engaging. Because online search is undoubtedly dominated by Google, you have to make your content palatable in the eyes of Google and its users. So, how do I do it? Read on to find out.
Positive Footprints: Striving for Relevance
It seems like a no-brainer to say that there is a strong need for your content to be relevant to your target audience. Of course, this is the basic principle of yielding to the market’s needs or demands. In the past, this meant that you had to use keywords that people were using to make their searches through Google.
Today, keywords are still very much relevant but the ways that they are used have changed drastically. Placing the searched keywords in the text did the trick in the past; now, there is a need to be a bit more careful. Aside from looking at the keywords themselves, Google also looks at the words that given keywords are frequently used with to check for relevance. For example, an article about “Mac computers” will only be considered relevant if it also uses logically related terms such as “Apple,” “Safari,” “Mac Air,” and others. In other words, try to discuss things more naturally. If the text is really about your primary keyword, you will surely use the words that are related to it.
This whole relevance thing is what SEO experts refer to as a positive footprint.
Negative Footprints: The Need to Stand Out
When Google sees you as relevant to the topic at hand, it will surely include you in the list of results that it gives a user. But being included is not enough. You see, if you are included but put on page 20, you might as well not be there. No user ever goes beyond even the first page! So if you want to enhance your chances of being clicked and visited by users, you need to stand out. This is where leaving a negative footprint becomes helpful.
When you say you left a negative footprint in SEO, it simply means that you have managed to stand out. How in particular? By talking about things that similar pages have not touched on.
To illustrate, if you are writing a how-to guide in malware removal from Apple computers, the terms “Mac virus removal,” “reboot,” “Mac reformat,” “Mac malware fix,” and “apple computer cleanup” might make you relevant. However, talking about “great customer reviews for Mac malware removal tool,” “tools with high success rates in malware removal from Mac PCs,” “little-known method for mac malware removal,” “get the most out of the cleanmymac malware cleaner,” and “the unique technologies used in removing Mac malware” is going to put you on top.
Simply put, while you need to use terms that are used by others to stay relevant, you still need to use unique keywords to be outstanding.
Making it big as an online content creator is a process that requires a systematic and well-informed approach. The information shared in this article is a good start. And as you grow, you also have to adapt to your growth. One way of doing this is inviting guest writers to create content for you, especially if their expertise is far greater than yours in certain topics or fields. Keep on improving, that’s the only way to go.
