Effective Writing

Many websites will skip this important step when creating a site using SEO. They often forget that the content of the site matters just as much as keyword usage or linking. Today's search engine spiders take language and writing into account. Search engines have begun to examine whole language rather than just words and will measure a site's use of sentences and various sentence structures. Using good writing and using that writing effectively has become more important than ever.Natural LanguageOne important element of effective SEO writing is using natural language and speech patterns to convey information. Since merely listing keywords on a page no longer makes that page "relevant" in the eyes of most search engines, SEO strives for a way to naturally and effectively use these words in context. Search engine algorithms are suspected of scanning and measuring the amount of natural language within a website. Some claim that Google is now taking counts of the number of the various parts of speech within a website-for example nouns, verbs, pronouns, and adjectives-and using those numbers as part of page rank. What's important is that the speech within a website be mostly natural, written text rather than just singular words or phrases.Keywords should be used in a natural context. For example, if the keyword is "birds," then this keyword, along with related keywords, should be used in natural speech. The word "bird" should also be used in titles and headings. Natural speech is not only helpful to users, search engines look for this in order to rank a page. Keywords will be discussed at greater length in the next section.Simply listing keywords in an unnatural way, usually used a technique to artificially inflate a page's ranking, will get a lower rating or a ban from search engines. Simply listing words related to the keyword-for example, listing bird related words, or simply listing keywords not even related to birds-isn't using natural language. A sentence such as, "There are many breeds of song birds in North America," on the other hand, seamlessly implements the keyword into natural language.Why is natural language important? As previously discussed, the amount of natural language on a page is, based on the opinions of SEO experts, being measured by search engine algorithms as part of page rank. Why do the search engines bother measuring natural language in the first place? In the early days of search engine technology, before the complicated algorithms of today, all a website would have to do to gain high page rank for a certain keyword is just use that phrase over and over, without any real, usable content. Today users know that websites like that can't be trusted for the quality of their content, so search engines try to weed out these results, rank them poorly, or remove them from rankings altogether.