While most of us are aware of how important creating search engine optimized (SEO) content is, only a rare few individuals on Hive actually do it. I attribute this lack of participation to the absence of definitive information and concrete incentive for users to partake in this fairly difficult task. Both of which I'd like to revamp with the completion of the Ultimate Hive SEO guide and the planned incentive structure I've got in mind for when the guide is finished. A clear-cut set of rules and guidelines on exactly how to write SEO-friendly content that ranks high across all search engines, and an innovative incentive model to encourage participation.
For starters, let's look into the actions we can take to create more optimized content.
Essential SEO tips for Hive content creators
Writing regular, generic articles is easy and anyone can do it, but crafting high-quality SEO-friendly content is a whole nother game. It requires laser-sharp focus and dedicated effort toward producing the right kind of content that readers will actually search for. It won't come easy at first, especially at the beginning but as soon as you pick up the basics and get some practice, you'll quickly get the hang of it. Your readers will greatly appreciate the additional effort and the reach of your publications will go through the roof.
In order to write in a way that's both reader and browser-friendly, we need to follow a set of rules and principles to go by when conceiving and materializing compelling SEO articles. While I'm no expert, I've been doing a lot of research on the topic.
Here is what I've found out.
When writing with the goal of creating SEO content we must:
1 Be strategic about our content
2 Create evergreen, comprehensive, and useful content
3 Make good use of keywords
4 Write eye-catching headlines
5 Structure and style our content to increase readability
While there may be many other advanced techniques for boosting SEO, in order to attempt to salvage the length and complexity of this article, I've decided to distill it into these five. This should be more than enough to get you going and increase your rank. If you decide to play the SEO game wisely, that is.
#1 Be strategic about your content
Writing good SEO articles is going to be a lot different than your regular "Out in the park with the dog" or "Check out this new cool thing I got" generalized posts.
In order to pull in a lot of eyeballs, your content must be fulfilling a burning desire in the mind of your target audience. A great piece of content will not only satisfy this desire for information but will also present it in an enjoyable and easily digestible format. It will be factual, informative, and straightforward, with no beating around the bush. Outstanding SEO content will always be remarkably helpful and it will meticously cover a specific topic or solve a certain problem.
When thinking about your next killer article a good way to start is by answering the following questions:
* What topic do I want to cover?
* What questions do I want to answer?
* What specific problem is my article going to solve for my readers?
* What type of format should I use to best relay the message?
* What style should I write in?
* What's going to make my article unique?
By simply going through this mental gymnastics, you'll quickly get that lightbulb moment and be able to pinpoint exactly what to write about and how to present your knowledge in the best way possible.
What topic do I want to cover? What questions do I want to answer? What specific problem is my article solving for my readers?
Take this post for an example.
It answers a specific question: "How to write more SEO-friendly content?" and it solves a specific problem: "low rank on search engines". As such, it has a higher probability of being directly searched for and that's the goal of any good SEO article. To be directly searched for by potential prospects with a problem that your article solves.
For optimal results, it's important to identify and address a specific topic, question, or problem you want to solve for your readers. Pick one and stick to it. After all, the goal is to create specialized, SEO-friendly content, not generalized and sometimes even personal-diary like articles which can be interesting at times but they are nowhere near ideal for SEO.
To succeed with SEO and content marketing, it's crucial to write about topics and burning issues that your target audience actually cares about. Without presenting specific information that they search for is more often than not, going to result in your articles being obscured by vast amounts of more well-thought-out and optimized, articles.
That's definitely not a place you want to be after spending so much time on time creating first-rate content.
But what if your creative juices ran dry and you can't figure out what to write about?
Here are a few ways to find topics for your next article.
- Use Q&A sites such as Quora and Reddit to manually find questions your target audience searches for online
This is an easy one.
Hop on your preferred site, locate the community/tag/section constituting your target audience and start clicking. Soon, you will find yourself a wealth of inspiration. Try to locating questions that people have already shown a big interest in (look for high engagement) and provide a unique answer which hasn't been brought up so far.
Additionally, you can post a TLDR accompanied by a link to your full article as a response to the question on the platform it was originally published on for some extra visibility/exposure.
- Simply browse the web for a specific question/keyword/topic/interest/niche community and see what pops up
I hope this is self-explanatory.
- Visit related forums, news-outlets, and groups/pages on your preferred social media platforms
Jump on bitcointalk, 4chan, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Pinterest and click away until you find something interesting and worthwhile to write about. This is often where you'll find the most inspiration as going through writings related to the topic you want to cover will get your neurons firing and creative juices flowing in no time.
- Use free tools such as UberSuggest, BuzzSumo, AnswerThePublic, and Google Trends
These are a treasure-trove of ideas.
Just type in a keyword and instantly you're going to find yourself with countless ideas for your next article. They are so easy to use that I won't go into more detail. Just know that you are only a few clicks away from your discovering topics that people actually search for!
AnswerThePublic query for "Hive Cryptocurrency"
For even more content-discovery tools and their brief explanation visit this article.
What style should I write in? What's going to make my article unique? What format should I use to best relay the message?
Once you've established clear ground by finding a topic to write about, question to answer and/or problem to solve the next step is to decide what type of content format to use to most efficiently relay the message you are trying to get across. Some topics would be covered better in a video than text, while others work best with image format like a meme or infographic, and for some topics, it's best to not over-complicate things and just stick to the good old fashioned written content.
Provided that you've chosen to write your thoughts out on this digital storyboard, the next step is to decide what style to write in. It will greatly depend on the topic and target audience. If you are writing a tech review, you're obviously going to use a more technical, data-oriented tone. On the other hand, if you're writing for a younger audience and the topic isn't as technical as tech review, you can opt for a more friendly, humorous, and conversational tone.
Finally, once you've got all this figured out it's time to find an edge that will make your article unique. Your competitors have likely written similar articles, which means your potential readers need your article to be unique — or, at least, different. To make your content worth consuming it's paramount to provide a unique value proposition which readers can't find elsewhere.
Create more unique content by:
- Digging deeper
- Expanding further
- Editing to perfection
- Using multiple resources
- Including an interesting twist
- Offering new insights/perspectives
- Using a unique content structure/style
- Providing personal experience if possible
- Using your own logic to explain things how you understand them
Sprinkle some of that magic on top to make your content stand out from the crowd.
#2 Create evergreen, comprehensive, and useful content
Evergreen content passes the test of time with an A+ remaining relevant forever. It has long-lasting value. Just like an evergreen tree that has leaves year-round, evergreen content always has a use. It’s a post that readers can reference for years to come because the information will always be true, relevant, and valuable.
Evergreen content include:
- Top tips
-
Testimonials
-
Product reviews
- How-to tutorials
- Encyclopedic information
- Frequently asked questions
In contrast to evergreen below are some formats with an expiration date:
-
Seasonal content (Christmas, BlackFriday, Women’s Day, Mother’s Day, Concerts, etc. )
-
Trending topics (these tend to die off pretty fast)
- News articles
Creating evergreen articles is crucial as it has a long shelf life and it keeps pulling in views throughout the years. Unlike a seasonal blog post that has a traffic spike right after publishing which quickly dies down, evergreen articles grow traffic and continue to bring in views over long periods of time.
Tips for writing evergreen:
1) Choose a precise topic and stick to it. 2) Aim at beginners because they constitute the largest amount (%-wise) of your target audience.
3) Be very specific and straight to the point because no one likes ambiguity.
4) Choose the right keywords (will be explained in a future article) if you want to rank high on search engines. 5) Present your knowledge and authority to build trust and credibility and establish a sence of expertise.
6) Choose an easy-to-follow structure and style (explained down below (#5)) to reduce cognitive-load and ensure a free-flowing experience for your readers.
7) Avoid overly technical language to avoid boring your readers to death.
8) Revisit your posts to update them if neccessary
or your evergreen articles will quickly become outdated and deciduous.
By going through a couple of examples you'll soon realize how all highly-ranked evergreen articles follow this exact modus-operandi. Methodically structured and styled, based on factual and verifiable information, straight to the point, geared for beginners, explained in a very casual and non-overly technical language that anyone can understand.
That's evergreen content in a nutshell.
Examples of comprehensive, useful, and evergreen articles:
- What are the Different Ways to Earn Hive?
- The Essential Guide to Social Media Management
- 15 BEST Keyword Research Tools for SEO
Open them up and notice a few things:
-
Styling
-
Paragraph length
- Information layout and clarity
- Use of headings and images
These articles are not only evergreen but also high-ranking (top few spots on Google) meaning that their search engine optimization is spot-on. They are prime examples of well-optimized articles. Read through them a couple of times to get a grip on how a good SEO article should look like.
Notice how neatly information is laid out to make for an easier read?
That's just one component of a great SEO piece (out of many) that you'll learn to replicate by following the tips from this article and the Ultimate Hive SEO Guide.
For more information about how to write evergreen content visit:
#3 Make good use of keywords
Given that this topic will soon get an article of its own I'll just scratch the surface today. In a dedicated article, I'll further expand upon what's mentioned here and update the information under this section with the full keyword guide. By now you are most likely aware of how important keywords are for ranking higher on search engines so I won't dwell upon that.
We'll jump straight into how to utilize keywords for optimal results:
1) Keyword research 2) Keyword placement
3) Keyword optimization
Research
Just as soldiers never go into battle unprepared, you shouldn't start writing an article before doing proper keyword research. It will end up costing you time as you'll often have to go back to re-write certain parts to include missing keywords.
How to find good SEO keywords?
Use free tools such as UberSuggest, WordTracker, and AlsoAsked to find the best keywords fitting your select topic.
For a quick case study I've decided to see what keyword suggestions Ubersuggest will give us for the term "how to buy cryptocurrency".
The results are fascinating.
UberSuggest search results for "how to buy cryptocurrency"
Out of all suggestions, terms " how to purchase cryptocurrency" and "how to buy cryptocurrency on robinhood" are the most competitive. This can be observed from how these keywords are eclypsing the rest under the difficulty section. What this means for us is that we will have a very tough time trying to rank for these keywords. Top results under such competitive conditions are either high reputation/authority domains or companies with deeeeeep pockets. Trying to outrank them would be close to impossible.
Fear not though as all hope is not lost.
We can always go for the low hanging fruit and select a similar keyword which isn't so crowded.
Outsmart your competition
In our case, simply replacing the word "purchase" with "buy" to rank for "how to buy cryptocurrency" instead of "how to purchase cryptocurrency" yields completely diferent results.
Although the meaning is virtually the same, results are completely different, greatly leaning in favor of "how to buy cryptocurrency" with its search volume being close to 8 times higher than the alternative. Also, the difficulty for the former is much lower than the latter. Making this small modification the keyword you want to rank for will have a huge impact on the overall rank of your article. To the point where you may even be able to compete with the "big guys".
Ignoring to do so on the other hand, will leave you eating someone's dust in a race with a car that has a flat tire and a broken engine going against an Aston Martin DBS Superlegger