9 Steps To Write The Perfect Content For SEO
In the rapidly shifting and evolving domain of social media management and online marketing, optimizing your website has acquired a major significance. To improve your ranking in the search engines’ result listings and increase organic traffic on your webpage, we bring to you 9 easy steps to generate the perfect content to optimize your site.
- Know your audience
The first major task while performing SEO is to keep your users at the forefront and follow every other step within the range that it sets. For this you need to set a demarcated profile of your target users. Who makes up most part of your audience? What are their needs? Why should they visit your page? These are the prime questions that you need to consider before you start.
- Keyword research
Since our aim is to generate traffic through search, you need to know what keywords are popular among users to search for a website like yours. Keyword research can help you validate and discover those words for which there exists a good amount of search volume. Google Keyword Planner can come to your aid here. It suggests words relating to your query that are currently trending or have historically trended. Go to Ad words account(if not exists, create one), Login->tools->keyword planner and type keyword. For example, if your domain is that of Public Relations, then the Keyword Planner will provide you data in the following way,
- High Quality Content
The most widely used search engines today aim towards listing the most relevant and high quality content at the top for their users. Websites with more interactive and engaging content aided with videos, infographics, blogs, etc have an upper hand over those offering just general information.
You need to make sure your content is unique, compelling and more valuable than that offered on a competitive page. For example, when searching for real estate investment options, a high ranked page would look something like this:
Whereas, a non-engaging page such as below would not get you enough visits.
- Keyword Optimization
Once your basic content is ready, you need to ensure that the keywords are sprinkled throughout the page’s content. With respect to the overall word density, keywords should compose about 1%-3.5%. This will make it easy for the search engines to pick them while you also avoid the risk of being blamed for ‘keyword stuffing’. This kind of optimization assures maximum search-ability and boost search engine rankings.
- Page Formatting
The arrangement of your content should be such that your researched keywords appear at the beginning of the page, say in the headline, and then repeated at the end of the content. They should also appear at least once in some of the intermediate paragraphs. Besides this, formatting tools like bold, italics and underline can be used to highlight the keywords, since the search engines assume them to be so. Let’s take the same example, see below and consider how neatly the elements are arranged. It’s aesthetically pleasing to look at and the keywords are clearly listed along with interactive options for the viewer.
- Use Synonyms
If the repetition of the same keywords is hampering the quality of your content, do not shy away from splurging on appropriate synonyms. Search engines understand the terminology and functionality of synonyms. Using such micro-content throughout the various write-ups on your page can help the bot to know with ease the topic your site covers. So use synonyms to avoid keyword stuffing.
- Content Organization
It goes without saying that a well organized content will not only impress the visitor but also make them stick around longer. This quality is just as important for SEO. A logical sitemap for the website with internal linkages between pages is another valuable tactic. Systematically organized content will improve the chances of the page being shared and gaining external linkages.
- Content Promotion
An important SEO strategy is external promotion. When your content is shared or mentioned on other social media sites, it increases your website’s search engine ranking. One way to achieve this is to have active accounts over a range of social media platforms and publishing high quality content
regularly. You can share links to divert this traffic back to your main website. Following are the examples of the same website on different platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin.
- Periodic Updates
Fresh content is a sign that your website offers accuracy in the present time. Keeping the page up-to-date, ensures that search engines will constantly be refreshing your pages within their index to access this new content. This in turn will greatly help improve your ranking with it. With a minimum of 4 new posts a month, you can ambitiously move up to 2-3 times a week, or even once a day.
Make sure your content is SEO ready with these easy and organized steps. Keeping these in mind, you can go ahead to design relevant and quality content for your users while also ensuring that they will find it.