SEO Content: Not Letting Keyword Density Come at the Expense of Style

Tim Nichols reports:

"Creating good SEO content is something of an unsung skill. Perhaps that's because it's a relatively new writing discipline. There's a constant call for high-quality SEO content on the Web and an ever-growing demand for accomplished writers who understand how to create effective optimized copy. In short, consistently publishing quality content that is SEO-aware in the form of case studies, blogs, etc. will help generate a growing amount of incoming organic traffic to your website...We've all seen advertisements that claim that writing SEO content requires no experience, and most of us have had the misfortune to come across copy written by people who believe that. The results are risible at best. And even if the amateurish blog or substandard article does manage to pull traffic to the site, visitors' interest won't be held for long if the content is poorly written or inaccurate. This happens all the time, and it's bad news for the companies who have bought second-rate content and deservedly bad news for the companies who employ so-called writers to provide it. Neither will be in business for long. Internet users are discerning people who are able to make decisions quickly and they'll spot shoddy work instantly. Poor-quality articles stick out like the proverbial sore thumb and drive away more customers than they could ever generate. The fact that a great deal of shoddy written work is circulating the net is something that should be viewed positively by those of you who are proficient writers. It means that more and more genuine and lucrative opportunities for you to create and sell content are opening up all the time. Similarly, companies wanting to grow their website organically by way of publishing quality content will be in a strong position. One of the problems that writers of SEO content frequently cite is making an article read with a natural flow while still regularly including the relevant keywords in the text. In some cases it's fairly easy to feature a keyword or several of them in a manner that makes for ease of reading. A single repeated keyword might slip virtually unnoticed into the body of the text without seeming too obtrusive. However, it's very often keyword strings that give SEO writers the biggest headaches. For example, if a writer were given a keyword string like ‘professional ad copy writing services,’ the text would pretty quickly read in a labored way if that exact string kept being used over and over. The best way around this is to use the string in its entirety where appropriate and then adapt the string to avoid the work seeming repetitive. This is where the canny SEO writer gets creative...Next, it is useful to remind yourself that you can switch the order of the words. Again, the search engine won't discriminate with regards to sequence, so it will pick them up. The benefits of moving the words around are more to do with style. And stylish SEO content is often thought to be thin on the ground, so the writer who can produce stylish SEO content will have the advantage in the marketplace...There is an ongoing debate about the importance of keyword density. And it looks as if there will continue to be a division in the camps over this particular issue. The main thing to remember, as an SEO writer, is that companies like to see content that is fully garnished with their definitive words...It probably goes without saying, but it may as well be said anyway, that finding how many times a given word appears in a text is easily achieved by using the Find facility in the Edit tools in your word processing program. When doing this, make sure the Match case option is unchecked and search for Whole words only. If you really can't face going about things in such a seemingly archaic way, then there is a plethora of keyword calculating tools available on the net. Some are supremely complex...After pondering the above, you might be wondering what sort of keyword density is required in a good piece of SEO content writing. Of course the perfect repost to this is, how long is a piece of string? Or even, how long is the perfect keyword string? It's impossible to say, really. And each piece you write will be different. As a provider of a professional service you are obliged to deliver what your client requests. And you'll probably be told many times over that 'content is king.' As a writer you will no doubt also wish to preserve your integrity by delivering quality pieces. And finally, perhaps it's time to change the adage 'Content Is King' to 'Quality Content Is King.'"