SEO for writers sounds like some tacked on, unimportant obligation necessary for online writing, but it’s not. Similarly as to how proper formatting, page design, and subject matter can make writings more attractive to people, a few, simple tips can help make your writing more attractive to search engines without compromising the integrity of your piece.
Got it? Good.
Writers often ignore much of the SEO advice most bloggers have come to accept as part of their writing process. Keywords, meta descriptions, URLs and linkable passages are seen as dirty and cheap instead of proper formatting for a web-based article.
For years, my journalism-trained self thought the same: SEO is the devil, Google presence was less important than story integrity, and, most of all, adjusting words for any reason of than making the story better a crime against the literary gods.
It ain’t true.
In the same way fancy book covers help get books noticed, SEO can help more people see the work you’re doing. Here’s a guide to make writing for the web a little easier.

What Readers Want
Fancy writers often provide long, expository statements at the beginning of their stories. Whether this is to set the mood, provide backstory, or to show off, it is WORTHLESS for most online pieces (many would argue that if a story even needs exposition, it should be rewritten). Journalism may call this a lede, but bloggers probably call it “the important part”.
This is where your keywords come in. Writing about SEO For Writers? You should mention that once or twice in your first paragraph. Heck, you should probably mention that every 100-150 words — SEO best practices recommend the same.
This is best accomplished by writing content first, then going back and changing terms where applicable. Readers don’t care about fancy wordplay, they want to know what the story is about — also, search engines will be able to properly index your content by subject.
Why They Want It
Now that you’ve identified your keywords and inserted them as necessary, the second part of our writing pyramid is telling readers why they want to read about the keyword you’ve chosen. The most successful writers are big on trying themed stories to their keywords, which makes for a nice balance of human-readable storytelling and can be used to create a properly written meta description later.
This second part is where readers can clearly tell if someone is writing with them in mind, or simply producing content for search engines. The web has enough of this, feel free not to muddy the water — toss chum in instead.
Explanation
The last piece of the SEO for writers pyramid should have all the “boring” stuff, like how to get more information, where the information can be found, and when all this is happening. Smart writers will see this section as content great for lifting tags from, as they can be used to classify content for better archive/search engine discovery.
Remember, tags are not keywords, but rather descriptive terms used to provide context for whatever results you’re looking for.
Now stop worrying about SEO and write your piece. As long as you write stories using some variation of the above framework, SEO comes easy after the fact.