Internet marketing is not a precise art, in fact, if anything, it’s abstract, as you’re working in an organic and developing sphere where artificial intelligence in the form of the search engine algorithms play a major role in how people locate your website and content.
This article is about developing a sound and practical content strategy that’s designed to give you a higher ranking in search engine results and therefore more exposure and traffic.
There are a number of vital SEO aspects to creating good on page content; these are very closely interrelated and important, they include:
The theme
Before you start creating content you need to give a lot of thought to the theme of your site – the underlining idea and purpose of your content – to give your visitors a very clear message.
It is essential to know what you want to achieve with your site and provide a clear path visitors can follow to perform the actions you want them to do. These are known as call to action prompts. There is little point in having a website that does not cause an action or effect.
Your online strategy and theme may be aimed at something as simple as introducing your brand and building your reputation, building a following or mailing list or asking visitors to complete surveys or enter a competition.
- Originality
It’s important that your content is original and unique; if the search engines have encountered the same content elsewhere they are likely to disregard it.
- High value content
Your content should be created for a specific purpose and to address a specific need or solve a problem the visitor you’re trying to attract has.
- High quality content
All content should be factual and grammatically correct with no typos or spelling errors.
- Relevancy
Your content should be highly relevant to your titles, descriptions, headings and subheadings and without any unnecessary distractions, as search engines are interested in purely relevant content and human visitors want to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily.
- Informative, entertaining or both
Your content should be written or created primarily for the benefit of your human visitors, so needs to be informative, interesting and if possible entertaining. Avoid boring and long winded text as few will read it. Spice it up with relevant humor to help make it interesting, but keep to the point.
It’s also vital to address the search engines that crawl your text looking for relevancy and information so they can index it such a way that the information is easily found by anyone using the relevant search criteria and phrases.
Your content must be created with SEO and search engine crawlers or bots in mind as they are how your content will be categorised and ranked in the search engine pages.
- Keywords and keyword phrases
When a searcher wants to find something on the internet, they enter search words or phrases into their browser. In order to make a general search they may just enter a word, they are more likely to enter a phrase.
If you were to enter pizza in your browser you will get several million answers which are not very specific in a matter of seconds. If you enter vegetarian pizza near me you will get results that are much more relevant. The more detail in a search query, the more specific the results will be.
The same works for keywords, the more specific the keyword or keyword phrases you use in your content the easier it’s to connect with searchers looking for your content.
You need to use keyword phrases that searches are likely to use to find your particular content.
- Continuity
Keywords are important to help you gain a higher ranking, but they must be used in a natural way in your content. The text must flow and be easily readable. Stuffing keywords or keyword phrases in inappropriate places or out of context will just make your content hard to read and the search engines will likely flag it as spam and not rank it.
- Link building
Another important consideration is to use links in your content so visitors can easily and quickly jump to other areas on your site and also link to other sites that offer highly relevant content, corroboration or provide additional information. Some content creators would consider this to be counterproductive, but it helps to show your readers that you are an authority on a subject and introduces them to more value from your site. It also gives you valuable links others can follow back to your site, the search engines take a lot of notice of high value links adding to your credibility.
- Content is King
There is no doubt that content is king, but keywords and keyword phrases are vital elements that make content searchable and findable. What use is content if it can’t be found?
To sum all this up, there a few rules that all writers need to follow when creating content and using keywords and keyword phrases, these include:
- Keep keywords and keyword phrases in context, your content needs to be easy to read and to flow naturally.
- If possible use one of your keywords or keyword phrases in the first sentence or paragraph of your content, but only if it sounds good and does not sound out of place or context.
- Once you have a theme for your content, use an app tool like UberSuggest to help you find the best keywords and keyword phrases that are likely to help your content rank well, you can discover how many times they are used by others each month and how much traffic they are likely to produce for your site.
- Meta tags are an important resource for the web crawlers to use to assess your content. They should be included in headings, titles and images. Part of the search crawler algorithm sets a time budget for sites and having properly formatted meta tags allows the search engines to discover and rank your site.
For more information, make sure to check out our SEO Secrets Series on our YouTube Channel!