Use these important tips to attract search engines and customers to your website. Once you try tackling content development for better optimization, some decide it’s easier to hire a firm or content professional. They are experienced at understanding your business goals, competition, target audience(s) and marketing objectives in order to set you up for optimal content marketing success. If you wish to take a go at it, here are some great SEO tips to follow:
Keywords
A keyword is a word or phrase that best describes the content on your page or post. It’s the search term that you want to rank associated with a specific page. This way when people search for that keyword or phrase, they should find the key word or phrase on a page on your website.
What are the Best Keywords to Use?
You need to think like your target market or user. Use the words they would use when they are searching. If your text does not match what your potential customer is searching for, they’ll never end up on your site.
Avoid Keyword Stuffing
Long gone are the days of repeating keywords to rank higher. Google has caught on to that. Too much phrase or keyword repetition on pages actually ranks you lower. Be creative and use several different ways to express what users maybe searching for.
Backlinks
These are links from one website to a page on another website. Google and other major search engines consider backlinks like votes for a specific page, meaning the content is credible, valuable or useful. Pages with a high number of backlinks tend to have better organic search engine rankings.
Content Structure
Long complex sentences do not play well in a search. Try to keep sentences simple and under 20 words maximum. Also, use your key words or phrases in your headline, subheading or first sentence of your text. Spread keywords throughout your text, not pushing them all into the first paragraph.
Meta Descriptions
Make sure to also use your key word/phrase in your page title and meta description. The meta description is a snippet of 126 to 155 characters – a tag in HTML – which summarizes a page’s content. It looks like this:
<meta name=”description” content=”A page’s description, usually one or two sentences.”/>
Meta descriptions exist to generate click-throughs from search engines. Images need these descriptions too. If this is beyond your abilities, we recommend consulting your programmer to help you with your meta descriptions.
Style and Voice
Use active voice and make it actionable. The text must be motivating and address the audience directly. To write a sentence in active voice, shift the actor or subject to the beginning of the sentence and move the object of the action to a position after the verb. If no actor is specified in the passive sentence, add one.
Use Transitions
Transition words are words like ‘and’, ‘but’, ‘so’ and ‘because’. They show your reader the relationship between phrases, sentences or even paragraphs. Transition words make it easier for your readers to understand how thoughts and ideas are connected. You can also begin a sentence with transitions such as “First, the actor jumped over the fence. Second, the actor climbed up the tree.” “First” and “second” would be your transitional words linking one thought or sentence to another.
Blogging
Blogging boosts search engine optimization (SEO) quality by positioning your website as a relevant answer to customer questions. Blog posts that use a variety of on-page SEO tactics can give you more opportunities to rank in search engines and get more customers to visit your site.
Testing Your Content
Developing online content for the highest possible search is both an art form and a science. It can take a while to get the swing of it. You’ll likely have to change your entire writing style to best optimize your content. There are many more rules for optimizing your content for search, but the guidelines mentioned will help to get you out of the search weeds.
There are plugins that agencies have which you can use to test your content such as Rank Math, Yoast, SEO Press and others you can use. These are can be helpful, but also very frustrating to the content writing process. Images, videos and analytics also play into supporting your text and attracting new users.
About:
Los Angeles based Sagon-Phior, a full service marketing and branding agency, utilizing emotional branding to build better relationships between a brand and an audience. Emotional branding enables more effective ways to increase brand awareness, loyalty and sales while revealing insights to better understand important, often unseen, patterns of consumer behavior.
Sagon-Phior has successfully applied this unique practice to many national and global brands in technology, healthcare, banking and lifestyle industries. For more information, go to Sagon-Phior.com
