How To Improve Your Content For SEO
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a simple way to turn your website content into instant SEO gold? Unfortunately the last time I checked there wasn’t. Search Engine Optimisation has become a major multi-disciplinary part of modern marketing and knowing how to improve content for SEO is now more important than it has ever been.
What Do You Want to Achieve?
In the early days, websites trying to attract the attention of the search engines (by which I really mean Google) used some very basic techniques, including stuffing their pages with keywords, sometimes not even in any coherent context. That doesn’t work anymore but there is still plenty of artless practice going on.
If search engine traffic is your only objective, then your results won’t be good. You can place the highest-ranking keywords on your site but the search engine crawlers will find you out. Unless your content is original and informative enough to engage your site visitors, its thinness will soon outweigh any of the advantages of keyword placement. High bounce rates tell the crawlers that your site is just not worth visiting and your rankings will fall.
SEO Tips: What You Shouldn’t Do
There are a number of technical measures you can take involving meta tags, site maps and other behind-the-scenes tweaks but you need to make it your priority to improve content for SEO.
Say you’ve created what you think is a really strong post about your core product or service. After a month you check its performance and find it’s barely been looked at. Why?
Maybe you’ve used keywords that have low search volume. Perhaps your coverage of the topic is actually fairly superficial or has nothing much to add that can’t be found elsewhere.
Maybe your content and headings are not logically coherent which means the crawlers can’t make sense of what the piece is about. If you improve content for SEO you can turn this around and show that you are something of an authority.
Even your chosen title tag might be working against you because although it sounds clever it doesn’t accurately reflect the content.
SEO Tips: What You Should Do
The best content will score highly on the four main metrics of SEO: readability, tone of voice, consistency and originality. Find the right topic and keyword, but remember that Google now pays more attention to how you cover the topic than to a single keyword. Keywords represent search queries while topics are the bridge between those keywords.
Include keywords that are semantically related because this helps crawlers understand what your content is about. However, beware of unbalanced keyword density – they should be spread evenly throughout, not concentrated in a few areas. Also watch out for cannibalisation, which occurs when you optimise different pages for the same keyword and they end up competing with each other.
Use headings and sub-headings clearly and logically. They help both site visitors and crawlers to understand your content. Also try to incorporate visuals, preferably original rather than stock images, and don’t forget the importance of logical internal links as well as those all-important backlinks from other sites which act as an endorsement of your site’s authority. Google still sets a lot of store by them.