The Most Shared Articles for Content Writers on the Web Last Week

There are more articles for content writers than anyone can get through being published every single day. From writing tips, to how to optimise your writing for SEO, and some slightly more wacky offerings, content departments across the web are reading, writing and sharing some of their favourite articles. Using ahrefs Content Explorer tool, we’re taking a look at some of the most shared content articles over the last week.

How to Outrank Big Companies When You Have No SEO Budget

Published on May 30th (seven days ago at the time of writing), with 171 shares on Twitter alone, this article from Neil Patel gives great advice for anyone working in the digital sphere. It can feel like digital marketing is increasingly becoming a “pay-to-play” platform, where only paid ads matter and the work we put into organic and SEO content doesn’t have an impact.
Being able to be agile, nimble and flexible as an organisation; partnering with other companies and writers; targeting your site content efforts onto a few select landing pages; optimising your site and content to encourage revenue and clicks; and keeping your content up-to-date are all things that will help you to keep up with competitors spending big money on their campaigns. Take a look here.

Get Rid of These 25 Phrases and Words From Your Content

Having a piece of writing full of “fluff” – words that don’t add substance and anything descriptive or emotive to a piece, is the bane of many content writer’s lives. In this article, Julia McCoy of Content Marketing Institute tells us about her pet hates when it comes to “fluff” words, and how to use more interesting alternatives. Read it here.

15 Advanced Link Building Tactics & Tips To Boost Your SEO

This article from Yoast is geared more towards SEO’s than to content writers, but it still makes for a good read to help expand your knowledge and understand more of the technical side of things. Kristopher Jones talks about why link building has been controversial in the past, but why it’s still so important for good SEO, and how to make the most of it.

Google Works To Fix How Many Legs Horses & Snakes Have

My favourite of the top articles is this one, just by merit of how bizarre it is. Last week, several people realised that if you type “how many legs does a horse have” into Google, the answer wasn’t quite what you’re expecting – the search engine results were telling you that a horse has six legs! It also told users that snakes have four legs.
This was due to an error in Google and other search engine’s algorithm that caused a riddle about horses on Wikipedia to rank and appear in the knowledge box. A Quora answer about the evolution of lizards and other reptiles into snakes is responsible for the assertion that snakes have four legs. Because, unsurprisingly, there isn’t much authoritative content about how many legs snakes and horses have, these pages were picked up by Google as the top answers on the web. Google is now working on improving the algorithm.
If you’re interested in these articles, content writing, the wider world of digital marketing, or anything in between, contact Embryo on 0161 327 2365.