SEO checklist for content writers

A situation that repeats itself again and again is that those asigned the task of writing content for websites are, well, writers of course. They aren’t webmasters or SEO experts. They are people who are good at gathering information and facts and producing great articles and content aimed at a specific audience.

At the same time, companies and organisations are expecting their websites to appear very high up in search engine result pages for various keyword phrases – often paying regular amounts of money to search engine optimisers who come in and tweak sites and pages, putting all the focus on the machine and less on the reader.

Practical help for writers

With just a little bit of practical help, writers can do a huge amount to help their websites, the search engines, and ultimately their readers. So here is that little bit of practical help for your content writers. This isn’t a definitive guide to SEO. I’m not going to claim it will put all your pages in the top three search results. What I will claim is that this guide and checklist will allow you to put a process in place for getting your talented writers to produce content that is much more search engine friendly.

The Checklist

Embedded below is an easy to follow check-list to give share with your content writers. You can also reach it directly via this link to Scribd: SEO Checklist for Content Writers Beantin April 2010

Example page

To help visualise the checklist, I’ve created fishbang, an example page that follows my checklist. The content is nonsense, it’s probably even a bit spammy for it’s optimised keywords “fishbang” and “bangfish” and the phrase “fishbang bangish” – but the oddness and low competitiveness of the those keywords and phrases means you can easily check where abouts it appears in search results.

Fishbang bangfish screenshot seo content writers

Publishing

Producing search engine friendly content is an important part of the jigsaw, but as you can’t expect content writers to be webmasters and SEO experts, you need to remember that good texts still need to be published with care and attention to detail. Without that icing on your content cake, your investment in quality texts could be wasted by poor quality web publishing.