Organic Content Writing: Don't Rely on AI
Lunch & Learn
24th October 2024
Original Content Writing
What is great content writing?
Mary’s Room
WTF is Qualia?
AI Generated Teapots
How write words good
Questions?
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Mary’s Room: The Knowledge Argument
Philosopher, Frank Jackson - Mary’s Room, 1982
QUALIA
“The felt or phenomenal qualities associated with experiences, such as the feeling of pain or hearing of sound or viewing of colour. To know what it is like to have an experience is to have qualia.” - Oxford dictionary of Philosophy
When AI goes wrong
April 2023
May 2023
Aljazeera, Reuters, BBC, UnHerd, Warner Bros
July 2023
July 2023
When AI goes wrong
X.com (Twitter)
But Alexis, how write words good?
The technical stuff
#ShortKing
What is Content Optimisation?
“Content optimisation is the process of refining and enhancing digital content to improve its visibility, engagement, and effectiveness. The process involves ensuring content quality, including keywords, writing compelling titles and meta descriptions, and earning authoritative backlinks.” - Semrush
But what does that mean in practice?
Writing content for online is a combination of technical skill and good creative writing. Following the basic principles gives a structure and plan to populate with the creative writing. Unlike an article in a newspaper or magazine, whose success depends on the publication, digital content success is individualistic and has to fight for visibility.
Digital content considers the search engine crawlers reading the content and the real people who read the content. Both audiences need to have their search interests met, be it for information in the content or structure of the page. Both audiences should leave the page satisfied.
Why is Good Content Optimisation Essential for SEO?
A website is only as useful and valuable, especially in Google’s eyes, as the quality of the content that populate it. However, as we have said previously, the actual writing is only a fraction of the cause the digital content’s success. How a website performs in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), and the quality of the traffic that is sourced there, is based from the website quality as a whole. To have a well optimised website is to have well optimsied content, they go hand-in-hand.
E-E-A-T: Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, Trustfulness
Google’s algorithm has one ultimate aim; to display helpful, reliable, people-first content. Every algorithm update is designed to display and highlight quality content, subsequently pushing the lower quality content down the line. Gone are they early days of keyword-stuffing a website to get it to the top of SERPs.
Y-M-Y-L: Your Money or Your Life
As a space for prioritising content that is helpful, reliable, and trustworthy content, Google introduced the concept of YMYL content. This is content that can affect health, finance, and safety. This information has to be correct and credible with credible sources. Each industry, such as medical and finance will have their own regulators and even different countries. At best, Google will deprioritise the content. At worst, it can be removed if it falls into legal classification such as defamation, consumer protection, and false advertising.
Basic Content SEO Principles
Keyword Research | Ideation example: VoxDev.Org
Think about the broad topic of the content. What industry or sector does it fall into? Which speciality of that industry or sector does it fall into? This can be multiple. “Academic Research -> Working People -> Working People Research ->”Labour Market Research”
What is a user looking for if they search this keyword? Are they looking for long-form content? Are they looking for a press release? Are they looking to cite the research? Are they students/a policymaker/a journalist?
What modifiers and qualifiers could be included? These are add-ons to the keyword that can enhance the keyword into more search specific terms. “Women Labour Market Research India”
Having a wide vocabulary allows for the possibility of multiple secondary keywords. For example, ‘Labour Market’ may become ‘Labour Force’ or ‘workforce’.
Metadata
VoxDev.org current metadata in SERP
Metadata - Continued
Meta Title: | Intra-household and intra-personal constraints to women’s employment in India | VoxDev | 86 Characters |
Meta Description: | Low self-confidence may keep women from persuading family members that they should enter the workplace, despite wanting to work themselves | 138 Characters |
Example URL: https://voxdev.org/topic/labour-markets/intra-household-and-intra-personal-constraints-womens-employment-india
Meta Title: | Female Labour Force Constraints in India | Blog | VoxDev | 56 Characters |
Meta Description: | Examining the intra-household and intra-personal constraints on the female labour force in India, from Madeline McKelway with VoxDev. Read the full article >> | 158 Characters |
Primary Keyword: Female Labour Force
Non-Optimised Metadata
Optimised Metadata
H1 and H2 Headings
H1 Headings:
H2 Headings
Headings on a webpage are akin to a book; An H1 heading is like a book title that gives a descriptive purpose to the content. H2 headings are like chapters, describing the content of that specific section.
Internal Linking
Imagery
We can see to the right that the images have neither no descriptive alt text or no alt text at all.