I don’t think there is enough understanding in the world of blogs and writers about how SEO works and how you must write to get something from SEO.
SEO is a search engine optimisation that in the west is mostly focused on google and how it optimises your website and articles in particular. SEO's focus is to show your website on the first few positions when a particular keyword is typed into the search bar.
The writer, or the blogger must use the relevant keyword that is often typed and popular on the search engine to get the website to show.
There are many more in-depth factors that can affect the ranking as well as how you show and on which position. This article is not about that. Here I would like to talk about how it is for a writer it feels to be writing for SEO.
Writers experience
I tend to classify myself as a gardener or a person who chooses a topic, thinks of some possibilities, and then goes into the idea and explores it as I go. I don’t use an outline and don’t use any structure. It doesn’t mean that I don’t eventually have one, but I build it up step by step within the article and not prior or after.
I know that this is not the best way to write technical articles and even writing normal, long articles can be a difficult task, to begin with. But my quality is always higher, and my personal satisfaction and fulfilment are higher when I use that technique instead of the norm that is used in the writing world of getting the outline first and than writing on top of that.
To tell you the truth, I can still somehow write long and complex things using this technique, and this technique does wonders to my quality of writing when it comes to fantasy writing. But it completely breaks down when it comes to SEO. It is impossible to use it for SEO.
Not only do you have to explore and get ideas from the search engine, but you also most likely have to copy the structure of the first ranking pages in order to rank even remotely high. Sometimes the quality of the writing does beat out the structure of the other high rankers, but mostly when it comes to SEO you have to play the game everybody else is playing, or you will be stuck on the 3-rd or 4th page that no-one ever visits and won’t get any traffic.
That is why, for me, it has been incredibly frustrating to write for SEO. I love what I do, and I love writing these articles and blog posts, but what I hate to do is lower the quality and limit my creativity because I need to improve my optimisation. It is the same as giving the painter a pen instead of a pencil because the pen technique of drawing is trending right now.
That is not how it works.
I hope that I can discover a better way to do SEO and eventually write to my heart content and still get SEO traffic. If you know a way DM me on Twitter or on the email that you can find below.
Thank you.
Klim Y