As an obedient online marketing student, you've been creating content for your websites, trying to please the teacher, ie, Google. However after the recent updates, it seems that pleasing the teacher got a little tougher!
Google Panda Update & SEO Articles
In Feb 2011, Google came up with the Google Panda update with the intention to improve the search result quality. As a result many sites with a lot of ads and low quality content started to fade off. They were replaced with quality content based sites, social networking sites, news sites etc. In this way Google gave an indication that SEO content writing techniques used previously which included keyword stuffing, spinning etc were out of the window. If you wanted to achieve good SERPs, you have to create SEO articles that are meaningful and need not be too "sales-y".
So, what do you do to create effective articles that will please the search engines?
Content Based on Keyword Group
To begin with forget about single keyword based content creation. Now, you need to focus on a group of related keywords. Since you cannot have SEO articles about a single keyword that is highlighted everywhere, you also need to work with the synonyms and other related keywords.
Write for Your Readers
Make the writing style more natural and less forced. This implies that you need to write for the readers and not the search engines. When you keep the readers in mind while creating the content, you are bound to get a reaction from the readers which would mean better visibility for your articles and also greater sharing. Such activities can help your content get visibility and achieve higher SERPs.
Avoid Excessive Links
When you want to link a certain article to another page on your website, you are bound to place anchor text links in various parts of the article. This is definitely a good activity but do not overdo it. Excessive linking just to try and enhance SEO will do no good.
Maintain the Length of Your Content
A lot of websites have multiple short pages created with content of anything between 150-300 words but that will not help any longer. Google has realized that a lot of webmasters used this technique to create multiple SEO articles and keyword based pages in order to try and work their way up the Google SERPs. In order to counter this, Google now gives more credit to content that is at least 400-500 words in length and can have sufficient information to keep the readers engaged.
You can easily follow the steps given above and see the difference in your SERPs. Most of these techniques are basic fundamentals for good SEO content writing that should have been followed even beforethe Google Panda update but if they were not, now is the time to do so!
Jai Bhujwala