By Dave Brown
Running a successful website requires effort in many different areas. In addition to coming up with a suitable design for the website site, authors will need to populate it with well-written content that attracts visitors. Many site owners hire SEO services to boost the popularity of their site, as writing SEO-friendly content themselves can be frustrating.
Let’s look at some of the challenges of optimizing SEO.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This refers to the practice of creating or altering website content so that it ranks better in search engine results.
Why is SEO Important?
Websites with poor SEO rarely show up in the first few pages of search results. As an author, you may place plenty of effort into writing high quality blogs and articles to draw in visitors, but your website may receive little to no organic traffic without the help of SEO.
Challenges of Finding SEO Success
Authors often assume that improving your SEO is a straightforward process that can be done easily. However, certain factors can make it a lot of more complicated than one would think. These include:
Keyword Popularity
At its core, SEO is about including the right keywords in written content to improve the site’s ranking. However, the popularity of certain keywords can work against content authors. If they write blogs using popular or trending keywords, there’s no guarantee that it won’t get lost in the vast sea of blogs and articles that contain the same keywords. As a result, their site will be unlikely to rank well in search engine results.
Conversely, if authors choose keywords that aren’t popular at all, very few users will look them up and find their site.
One possible workaround for this problem is to use long-tail keywords. These are keywords that consist of multiple words. For example, if a user wants to find electricians in their area, they may simply Google the term “electrician”, and receive hundreds of thousands of non-specific results. However, if they look up “residential electrician in Sacramento”, they are likely to find exactly what they are looking for.
The latter term in this example is a long-tail keyword, and is likely to be present in fewer website blogs and articles than the short term keyword “electrician”. So if a website contains this long tail keyword, it will likely rank better with people who are seeking a residential electrician in the Sacramento area.
Agencies that offer content writing services often use a combination of long-tail and short-tail keywords in their marketing strategy. This can help boost the website’s organic traffic significantly.
SEO Rules Are Always Changing
Another point of frustration for authors is that Google is constantly changing its SEO rules. This means an SEO strategy a site owner or blog author developed in the past may not be applicable in the present. As a result, they may need to rewrite their past content to fit the most recent set of rules.
However, this can be incredibly time consuming depending on how much content they have already written and uploaded to their site.
Authors may be able to get around this problem and “future-proof” their written content by focusing on core SEO principles such as:
- Offering content adds value to readers.
- Creating numerous backlinks.
- Offering a great user experience.
SEO Factors That Are Difficult to Control
Authors that have recently started a website may try and optimize it for SEO by populating it with high quality written content and by also offering a great browsing experience. However, their site may still fail to surpass other sites in search engine rankings due to factors out of their control.
It has been observed that Google offers better rankings to older sites due to the fact that they are already populated with a large quantity of content containing SEO optimized keywords. If the site is relatively new, it won’t have anywhere near the same volume of keywords as competitor sites that have been around longer. In this situation, authors will need to put in effort continuously and wait for their site’s SEO ranking to improve over time.
As you can see, finding SEO success can be a challenge for authors. They can focus on writing passionate and well-researched articles, but they won’t get very far without paying respect to SEO.
Despite the numerous challenges of finding SEO success, authors should not be discouraged from working on optimizing their websites. They may not be able to account for every SEO factor that boosts their ranking, but they may still be able to make significant progress using the factors they can control.
Dave is the head of guest blog writers at Content Development Pros. All the guest blogging material handled by the company is supervised by him. He enjoys reading Terry Pratchett, watching Anime, and sketching to relax.
