How To Write Content That Will Improve Your Search Engine Rankings

What’s the number one purpose for developing a content strategy and posting new material to your website or blog regularly? There are a few reasons that come to mind immediately, including:

•       To establish a person or company as a subject matter expert
•       To assist potential clients or current clients with problems they may be facing
•       To get found online in search engines
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I’m hoping that the last bullet point came to your mind immediately, because if so, we are on the same page here. Content creation and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are so closely related that they might as well be brother and sister. Having a content marketing strategy is so important for search engine rankings. These days, you cannot have one without the other.

So here you are, sitting in front of a blank Microsoft Word document, ready to write the next groundbreaking piece of content for your business. How should you approach your writing so that you can optimize it for Search Engines?

Focus.

Before you write anything, consider what the page will be about. Choose one focus keyword that would be the main subject of the piece. This could be a long-tail keyword or a shorter one.

As you write, keep your focus keyword in mind. Wherever you can naturally add the keyword or a variation of it, do it!

Be like Goldilocks.

If you’re wondering how many times your keywords should show up throughout your content, just pretend you’re Goldilocks. Not too much, not too little, but a happy medium should be your sweet spot. I know this seems like an incredibly vague answer, but there is no magic number to hit. It depends on your post’s length and how detailed the topic may be.

Write in a personable, natural manner and include your focus keyword where possible. Don’t go back through and add your keyword too many times in places that don’t make sense.  However, don’t be so concise that your post is extremely short. If you cut it too short, you could be missing valuable opportunities to expand on your thoughts and include keywords while doing so.

Remember the Search Engine Optimization basics.

There are a few steps you should take to fully optimize your page for Search Engines. Make sure that your Page Title, Meta Description, Alt Tags and H1 tags are all set up before you hit “Publish”. This will help you out in leaps and bounds in regards to SEO.

Be Social.

In the past year, search engines have become more in tune to Social Media platforms and their influence. If you post your content to social media channels and it is shared, liked and receives many comments, there will be a positive impact on the page’s search results. Now your network of friends, family, business contacts, clients and prospects is extra valuable!

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9 WAYS to Improve Your Blog

Keeping your blog interesting and updated is important if you want visitors coming back to your website. Here are nine ideas to help you improve your blog.

1. Change up your color theme. Get some feedback on how others react to your current color theme. Decide if it is time to update your website with a new color theme, or if there is another color theme that would better promote your website. You can also change your color theme seasonally or with the holidays. Changing the color theme periodically will keep your website looking fresh and new.

2. Update old content. Go through your old blog posts that received a good response and update them. Keep the original post, but add an update with new commentary, new research or just new information you have learned since originally writing it. Updating the content will boost your optimization, and then you can share the updated content through your social networks.

3. Introduce some guest bloggers. Introducing a fresh voice to your blog often helps. You’ll be gaining good karma by helping promote a fellow blogger, while also giving your readers a new perspective. Additionally, it will give you the opportunity to post new content without having to take the time to write new content.

4. Have critics weigh in on your website. If you aren’t sure how you can improve your website, start asking people. Have people, who aren’t your friends, look at your website and share their honest opinion.

5. Create an editorial calendar. While many bloggers like to be led by inspiration, this can lead to large gaps between posts or stressful nights of sitting up late and writing. Creating an editorial calendar will provide you with a solid road map for the weeks to come. If, during that time, you come up with a great new idea, you can still write a post and publish it. Then go back to following your editorial calendar.

6. Add a slide show or video. If all the content on your website is written, you can boost your site by adding some video or a slideshow. Many mobile users are showing a preference towards video content over written content because it is easier to take in new information while on the go.

7. Create a mass of new content. While you might follow a normal schedule of posting 3-5 new posts a week, brainstorm a list of possible topics. Once you have a list of 10 or 12 topics, write them all and publish them as soon as you are done. The influx of new content will give visitors a lot to mull over while visiting your website. It will also give you plenty of content to start sharing through social networks and bookmarking sites.

8. Focus on what differentiates you. There needs to be something that makes you stand out from your competition. You need to identify what differentiates you from the rest and promote that through your posts and social media. Readers need to know why they should read your blog, opposed to someone else’s within your niche.

9. Ask your readers to send in questions. This is a great tactic if you start feeling stuck or you aren’t sure what to write about. Create a post instructing your readers to post their questions in the comment section below the post. Let them know they can ask you anything they want and that you will go through and choose questions to answer in the coming weeks.

5 Tips to Get Your Blog Started

It seems like these days everyone has their own blog, so why not start your own? It will provide you with an outlet to explore interests, share your opinions, as well as promote a business. Although starting a blog is not difficult, it may be intimidating if you have never done it before.

Here are 5 tips to help you get started with your new blog.

1. Consider your niche. Decide what your blog is going to be about. Even if you stray from your primary theme from time to time, you need to have a primary niche or theme you are going to focus on. Deciding on your niche first will help you to make other decisions, as well as keep your blog focused on the topics your audience wants to read about.

2. Choose a name. Choosing a name can be difficult. You want to choose a name that will be SEO-friendly, so people searching your topic are more likely to find you. However, you also need it to be descriptive of your content and theme, memorable, and available. Typically, I would suggest starting with what’s available since there tends to be a scarcity of low-cost, dot com names. However, with the recent launch of new domain name options, this is less of a problem.

3. Choose a blogging platform. You need to find a platform that you will be comfortable using. WordPress is one of the most popular platforms, but there are many others to choose from.

4. Start writing. You need to decide how often you are going to post to your blog, and then you need to stick with that schedule. Consistency is important for SEO purposes, but also to keep your readers happy. If you post randomly, they may lose interest. You can decide to post once a week or five times a week, it is up to you. However, the more frequently you post, the better results you will get in search engines.

5. Share your blog with others. Hopefully, over time, your audience will grow organically. However, to get the ball rolling, you need to share your blog with others, so they know it is there. You can share your blog through social media with your friends and family, and encourage them to share it with others. You can also share through crowd sourcing websites like Digg and StumbleUpon.

Good Luck!

5 Steps To An Integrated Approach To SEO-Friendly Content Marketing

The content explosion and the search engines’ shift toward meaning-based content in 2013 has led to a tipping of the scales in the opposite direction from where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was before Panda and Penguin.

Gone are the days of black hat practices like keyword stuffing and paid linking schemes that resulted in a bad user experience and little focus on content quality.

While the increased focus on quality has created a better user experience, now the challenge of the marketer is to integrate SEO best practices into the content creation process.

User-friendly content must also be easy to find, and that means including SEO in every step of the process.

Because investments in content are growing at a record pace, the pressure for online marketers to show increased returns are heightened. And with organic search as a leading source of traffic for many marketers, streamlining the content creation process while optimizing for search is a business necessity.

In other words, the content must be optimized for the user as well as the search engines before it is even published.

The Integrated Approach To SEO

The integration of search engine needs and user needs means that the SEO has to be involved at every step of the content creation process. Here’s how SEO-focused thinking can be applied to the primary steps of content creation:

1. Understand User Needs & Behavior

How do users search for the type of content you offer, and in what volume?

Keyword research early on in the process will help focus content creation efforts, preventing the wasted effort of creating content for low-volume keywords. Keyword research hits the sweet spot in your content creation efforts by finding the balance between users’ product-related needs, the product offerings, and how users actually search the web.

As you think about keywords, consider the impact of Google Hummingbird and how Google is getting even better at semantic search. This can be a huge opportunity if you put yourself in your users’ shoes and understand how they actually search – think conversational search!

2. Write Optimized Content

Many writers are aware of SEO best practices such as keyword density and headline optimization. From our experience working with enterprise content teams, we understand that content writers are generally motivated to optimize their content for organic search.

If the SEO team empowers writers with the skills and tools to keep SEO best practices in mind, content will be search engine friendly right out of the gate.

For example, one of the largest online travel companies commits resources to training content writers on how to optimize content for search as they write. Writers are educated on the value of organic search and the positive business impact of ranking in search engines, as illustrated through historical performance of their sites. Content writers are also trained to edit titles, header tags, meta tags, image tags and the page URL, among other on-page optimizations.

When SEO tools are seamlessly embedded in the content writing workflow, SEO is not seen as an obstacle, but integral to the process of publishing quality search-engine friendly content.

3.  Optimize Technical SEO Elements

Enabling writers to make content inherently search friendly is a huge leap toward making content ready for search. This also helps the SEO team scale.

However, there are some technical SEO tasks that writers may not be equipped to handle. The SEO team needs to take the baton and review pages before publishing to ensure consistency between the content, keywords and the technical elements of each page.

This step is not just about optimizing the on-page elements. The critical part of this step is to define a process that ensures a smooth hand-off from the content writers to the SEO team (or a process which allows parallel writing and optimizing on-page elements).

Regardless of how you choose to manage these two steps, be sure to document and communicate this across the SEO and content teams.

4. Publish & Promote

The two primary SEO elements involved in publishing and promotion are linking and social engagement.

Are the linking sites relevant to both the content and the keywords that content is being optimized for? Look at the internal links, both inbound and outbound, to make sure they are linked to the relevant pages. Also look at your competitors’ link profiles for pages similar to yours. Who links to their pages and what is their authority?

When looking at backlinks, set tasks around the opportunities and the competitor tactics you have identified. The benefit of backlink analysis and activity accrues over a longer period of time, so it’s important to follow up periodically after content is published.

As for social engagement, are keywords being reinforced in social promotion? What is the social media traction for your competitors’ pages? Does it correlate with their rank? Given the volatile nature of trending topics on social media, it’s also important to  consistently analyze current trends and incorporate relevant messages into your content.

Don’t force these topics in your social sharing — instead, let these questions guide your actions:

1. What’s trending in social media that is relevant to your content?
2. What semantics are used to describe these topics?
3. Are these adjacent to the keywords that the content is optimized for? If yes, you are in a good place to share relevant content that is trending in social media.

Feeding America followed such a process to drive 2.5X traffic growth from Twitter.

Again, the success in this phase largely depends on how you map the workflow between the SEO, social and link building team/team members.

5. Measure SEO & Business Performance

Measuring content performance takes all your investment in technology, content, SEO, link building and social media to its logical end.

Once the content is published, you need to carefully track it against business outcomes. How well do the pages rank? Is the conversion rate within your target range? Is new content cannibalizing existing content? How are related groups of new pages performing?

Track not only overall traffic from organic search but business performance of pages based on their rank and estimated keyword volume. Examine competitive strategies for competing content. What can be learned from actual performance that can be applied to future SEO and content creation efforts?

Secure Search & Content

Steps 2 through 5 are a practical implementation of page-based SEO, which I have been a huge proponent of, particularly since the move to 100% Secure Search.

The loss of keyword referral data forces us to look at SEO from a page-based view reinforcing the position that a focus on content is what truly matters. Keywords still are core to SEO, but SEO is not exclusively about keywords, and the use of keyword data has changed.

For a more detailed description of Page-based SEO and how it is all the more important in a Secure Search world, my article, Secure Search & SEO Methodology: Key Strategies & Enablers, shares more detail.

Conclusion

A true content-centric content strategy is also SEO-centric. SEO thinking needs to step out of its silo and into every step of the content marketing process: audience research, writing, optimization, promotion and measurement.

Successful content programs are built from a foundation of not only knowing the audience and what they want, but knowing how they look for what they want. By integrating search engine needs with human and business needs, marketers will achieve greater success in 2014 and beyond.