With a barrage of articles bombarding the internet on a daily basis, how do you make your content stand out and make the search engine robots notice in order to make a positive impact on your site?

Following are some guidelines that you can follow in writing your articles so that you will be noticed by the search engines:

• First and foremost, your content must be original. It should not be duplicated or stolen from any other content around the internet. You should also be careful about not having redundant articles within your site. By redundant, meaning different articles should not have basically the same topic even though they have different titles.

• Your articles must provide relevant facts or quality research in order to create value for your readers. This can be in the form of original research, something that has no other known sources elsewhere. Oftentimes it’s juts providing analysis on a set of data that you compiled from different sources and providing your own spin on it. 

• Make it a point to correct any factual, grammatical, or spelling errors before submitting your content.

• You must provide articles that are interesting to users and not for search engine robots alone. So many people focus on the SEO aspect of creating articles that they lose sight of their primary purpose in the first place which is to create useful and engaging content for people, not the robots of the various search engines. Don’t forget that it’s the people who will subscribe to your newsletters or services or buy your products; hence you must keep them at the top of your mind when you are writing. You can worry about inserting the SEO stuff later in the process.

• You must work towards building authority for your site. Taken in the context of the search engines, they view authority as the relevance of your content, the number of back links that you get especially from credible sites, the anchor texts with keywords, and the quality of the traffic coming into your site. To gain this you must write engaging content that puts people in mind first rather than the search engines, have a good layout that is more centered on usability, and promote the site’s growth naturally based on sound promotional strategies.

• Write something that is worthy for your favorite magazines to print. We all have our favorite journals or magazines. Try and take a look at the articles that are written in them. Analyze what makes them so great and try to copy the writing styles as much as possible. Over time, you will certainly improve your content and your readers will also appreciate your improvements which could certainly lead to an upward increase in interest and traffic back to your site.

The above guidelines are just a few among many that you may use in order to write SEO-friendly content. Just remember to think about your readers first and about SEO second. Get a lot of practice as far as your craft is concerned and engage in sound and ethical behavior over the web and you will surely reap the rewards over time.

George Peterson currently works for one of the leading Google search marketing agencies in Denmark – Outrider. He currently works as a SEO (interesting to know is that the Danish term is søgemaskineoptimering) manager. This article was written by a guest author. Would you like to write for us?