In my never-ending quest to soak up the never-dormant volcano of information flowing about SEO and SEO copywriting, I came across this article from Matt Cutts. It’s a few months old, but still has good info: “SEO Advice: writing useful articles that readers will love.”

One of the best parts of the article is his paragraph on “niches”. it’s a short read, so, you don’t have to take much time.

Karon Thackston offers her take on what Cutts had to say in her article “The Purpose and Practice of Writing Successful SEO Articles”

Here’s the beginning of Cutts’ article:

Okay SEOs, what can you learn from my previous post about changing the default printer for Firefox on Linux? In the last week someone wrote and said “I want you to talk about SEO, and don’t give me any of that crap about good content.” I’m going to beg to differ. I wrote that post mainly because I’ve looked for this information a couple times and never found exactly what I was looking for quickly. That tells me that in this small niche, I could utterly rock the search engines. Plus once I figured out the info, it was only 10-20% more time to package it up nicely. Now this short content post can act as an evergreen draw for searchers.

Notice what I did with keywords. I carefully chose keywords for the title and the url (note that I used “change” in the url and “changing” in the title). The categories on my post (”How to” and “Linux”) give me a subtle way to mention Linux again, and include a couple extra ways that someone might do a search–lots of user type “how to (do what they want to do).” I thought about the words that a user would type in when looking for an answer to their question, and tried to include those words in the article. I also tried to think of a few word variations and included them where they made sense (file vs. files, bash and bashrc, Firefox and Mozilla, etc.). I’m targetting a long-tail concept where someone will be typing several words, so I’m probably in a space where on-page keywords are enough to rank pretty well. I don’t need anchor-text for “linux default printer” or similar phrases; in the on-page space, I’d recommend thinking more about words and variants (the “long-tail”) and thinking less about keyword density or repeating phrases.

Read the rest of: “SEO Advice: writing useful articles that readers will love.“

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