Why It’s Good to Optimize as you Write

Posted by Craig Maloney | April 22, 2013 | Filed under: SEO

Search and social media have improved greatly over the last few years, especially in the realm of search engines and the algorithms that power them. Recent changes in the way engines like Google index pages have fueled a renewed interest in quality content, and have forced marketers to adjust their SEO techniques to compensate.

These days, SEO is no longer just a technical aspect, limited to coding gurus and web developers, but a full-on marketing aspect that requires a working knowledge of both technology and writing to be successful.

The Problem – Content Management Systems

For quite some time now, Content Management Systems presented the biggest problem to SEO specialists, as they were designed primarily to manage content and had little to no facilities for proper SEO. Straight out of the box, a content management system will not optimize anything for SEO, leading to bad meta tags and keywords, dynamic URL issues, and a host of other issues.

This meant that content had to be written first, optimized later, creating a time gap between writing and optimizing. Often times this led to technical and marketing departments within large companies would be at odds with one another over crucial implementation details, hurting both their marketing efforts, and the company as a whole.

Making this problem worse is the fact that most CMS users aren’t familiar with SEO techniques and principles, and don’t have access to the resources or time necessary to properly learn them.

The end result is that companies end up publishing un-optimized content, which can’t be optimized until it’s published, and content published in an unoptimized state gets penalized by Google.

The Solution – Combining CMS and SEO, Optimizing as you Write

The solution to this problem is to have content writers optimize while they write, as opposed to doing it after publishing.

On the surface, it seems that this may increase the overall time spent authoring content, but the benefits ultimately outweigh the costs. Integrating SEO techniques into your content writing and marketing processes will improve your content’s SEO performance right from the start, and will allow you to spot and correct errors before they have a chance to do damage. Furthermore, by empowering your writers to learn SEO principles and practices will improve the quality of their content, and may actually reduce the time spent authoring content in the long run, since your writers will be capable of producing search-engine ready content from the start, with fewer errors.

Companies such as Travelocity, after integrating SEO techniques into their content authoring processes, reported seeing a tenfold increase in traffic while their site rose 5 positions higher in organic search results. Toy retailer eBeanstalk also saw an increase in conversions and traffic on product pages that received the same treatment.

There are a number of tools that can help you and your team manage the workload, ranging from fully featured software suites such as Adobe Experience Manager, to Inbound Writer and Yoast’s WordPress Plugins, simple software plugins that work with any CMS and help writers better optimize their content for search.

Conclusion

Changes made to the way search engines work have made it not only practical, but necessary to integrate SEO techniques into existing content authoring processes. Doing so will not only improve the quality of the content, leading to better business, but it will also make your marketing teams more efficient by enabling content and technical departments to work together in unison.