SEO Medical Writer

Most medical writers have excellent English skills and a solid understanding of the subject matter at hand. An experienced writer will also be able to relay this complex medical information to a reader in a simple to understand manner without losing the key points of the subject matter. But very few medical writers create optimized content for SEO purposes either due to the belief that SEO should be left to the SEO consultants or their craft does not require additional skills like SEO.

Your content is only as good as the site it appears on or the level of SEO. An article ona  strong site will rank well, even without optimization. But on a new or fairly ‘weak’ site the content needs to be fine tuned for maximum SEO capability. There is still much confusion about how SEO content writing differs from traditional content writing. It is not about stuffing your article full of keywords. It’s not just about optimized heading tags and internal linking among articles.

SEO content is so subtly optimized that it does not create for an awkward read for the human user yet achieves the maximum SEO effect.

Keyword Alternation

You may have heard of keyword prevalence and keyword density in SEO content writing but keyword alternation is still fairly unknown among content writers. If you are constructing content and want the maximum keyword density, your content will be of poor quality if you keep repeating the same keyword over and over again.

Let’s look at a simple example where the keywords are ‘dyspnea’ and ‘breathing’.

Dyspnea is any abnormal breathing where there is difficulty upon inhaling or exhaling or related changes in breathing. Dyspnea is also referred to as shortness of breath and a patient with dyspnea will either complain of labored breathing or it will be apparent by the manner in which they are breathing. Other symptoms that may indicate that a patient is suffering with dyspnea includes flaring of the nostrils, shallow or rapid breathing or slow and deep breathing.

As you will notice in this extract of 77 words, the keyword ‘dyspnea’ appears four times giving you a keyword density of 5.2%. The other keyword ‘breathing’ appears 6 times in the 77 word paragraph giving you a keyword density of 7.8%.

This may seem impressive in terms of keyword density for SEO but it does not make for the easiest read among human users. Also remember that when you exceed the 3% to 4% optimum keyword density of SEO purposes, you can get flagged for keyword spamming.

So how do you find a balance between the reader’s needs and those of the search engine while still making for a well written and informative article?

Simply learn to play with your keywords – a technique known as keyword alternation. Here you will look at your primary keywords. In this case it is ‘dyspnea’ and ‘breathing’. Then you will use a keyword tool, like Google Adwords Keyword Tool, to identify synonyms or related terms to your primary keywords. These words are known as your secondary keywords.

Without even using a keyword tool, you will know that ‘dyspnea’ will also refer to ‘shortness of breath’, ‘breathlessness’ and ‘short breath’. With regards to ‘breathing’, you know that terms like ‘respiration’, ‘inhaling’. ‘exhaling and ‘breathe’ are all related. Nevertheless confirm this with the keyword tool to ensure that Google recognizes these symptoms.

Let’s rewrite that paragraph.

Dyspnea is any abnormal breathing where there is difficulty upon inhaling or exhaling or related changes in respiration. A patient experiencing dyspnea, also known as shortness of breath will complain of labored breathing or there will be signs of breathlessness. Some of the other signs and symptoms of dyspnea includes flaring of the nostrils, shallow and rapid or slow and deep breathing.

In this reworked paragraph, the keyword density may have dropped but the SEO potential has increased. It also makes for a well constructed article without being repetitive.

In successive articles, we will discuss other aspects of SEO content writing including :

• Titles, Subtitles and Heading Tags
• Article Layout, Paragraphs and Word Count
• Primary and Secondary Keywords
• Internal and External Links for SEO