During April 2012 Google rolled out its latest updates, Penguin and Panda.  The objective of the updates is generally to repel those website which are written primarily to score highly in Google rankings.  Those sites which are stuffed with keywords, those with excessive links and meaningless content should now be penalised by being pushed far down the organic search rankings.

Although you should have search engine rankings in mind in your SEO strategy, it shouldn?t be your main focus when writing content for your site.  In general, always focus on effective content writing for your site, blogs and articles.  Keep in mind the following and you?ll achieve great content, and avoid being penalised in the rankings.

Use your keywords only when needed

Just remember – what you and your colleagues think of as keywords may not necessarily be what your prospective customers are using when they perform their searches. Do some keyword research into what words people are actually using to find your website, and your competitors websites. 

Make your content social

Think about topics that interest your audience in general, those that both directly and indirectly relate to your business.  Create compelling and meaningful headlines that engage with people and make them react to them.  Pose questions and ask for feedback – people love giving their opinion! 

Create a resource that?s highly useful

Make sure you create content for your site that is useful for your readers.  Focus on content that addresses topics your audience are interested in and give them a use for it.  This makes it far more interesting to search engines.

Create content for other websites and blogs

If you?re writing a blog for your own site, why not write guest blogs that can be published on other sites.  This extends your reach, and can earn quality backlinks.

Regularly publish a newsletter

This is still arguably the best way to keep in touch with your customers on a regular, unobtrusive basis.  Content must be topical and timely, and not based on self-promotion.  This again lends itself to what Google and other search engines are constantly basis rankings on.