The Complete Guide to Optimising Content for SEO

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Content remains king, and Google places it among the top three ranking factors. There is a need to stay updated on the latest Google algorithms to ensure that your content is working for you. Your website is like wheels; without an engine, you will be pedaling without making any progress. While many businesses have embraced the use of content, not many are harnessing the benefits that Search Engine Optimisation offers.

Here is our comprehensive checklist on how to optimize content to generate leads and sales.

  1. Have an SEO Content Strategy

To reap the benefits of SEO, you need to treat it as a crucial component of your marketing efforts. Many businesses make the mistake of using SEO as a mere promotional tool. However, this must be an ongoing endeavor to harness all the benefits. Having an SEO content strategy ensures that you stay committed to your goals. When developing the strategy, the first course of action is to define your target audience. Once you know your target, you can understand their language, which will help you develop relevant keywords.

  1. Create Quality Content

Good SEO practice is pegged on creating engaging content. When you engage your target audience, they will consume more of your content, which will, in turn, lead to sales. While content should be informative, there’s a lot more that goes into making great content. There are certain SEO best practices that should inform your content creation. Quality content is inspiring, coherent, clear, entertaining, relevant, practical, thorough, novel, and educational. As you develop content, remember that you write for people, not search engines. This content, therefore, needs to be shareable. Another best practice is to ensure that the content can be easily scanned. You, therefore, need to use short paragraphs, bullet points, bold texts, and callouts to make it digestible.

  1. Create Appropriate Content

When creating content, remember that many other websites compete for leads and customers. Your website needs to stand out, and one way is to ensure that typos and grammatical errors do not mar your content. Poorly written content reduces the credibility of your business. While your content should not be too complicated, it should exhibit professionalism. It is also vital to create citations and hyperlinks to authority sites. This helps to add to the credibility of your work. It also shows that you are serious about what you do. Correct content should also be fact-checked. Do not state facts or statistics that you cannot back.

  1. Optimize for Keywords

Keyword optimization needs to be handled with care. For starters, establish the keywords to use and plan how to spread them in the articles or blog posts. Having the keywords in the title is good practice so that search engines can easily find them. The rest of the keywords should be well spread out in the content you are creating. While content should be optimized for keywords, you should avoid keyword stuffing. This will reflect poorly on the search engines. Another essential aspect when optimizing content is to use the keywords naturally. Most content developers make the mistake of forcing keywords to try and fit in a number of keywords in their text. If outsourcing content creation, ensure that you do not compromise on keyword usage. The keywords need to appear natural and organic.

SEO Brisbane is a tried and tested way to increase traffic and generate sales. However, you need an ongoing strategy. It should not be a hit-and-run affair. It needs to be integrated into your marketing efforts.

At one time, what is now known as ‘keyword stuffing’ was used by people wanting to rank highly in search engines. This is simply using an important related word over and over again in website content so that search engines think it should be rated highly for relevance. As search engines have evolved, this won’t work anymore, and such content will instantly be discarded as being too ‘spammy.’ This doesn’t mean that keywords aren’t necessary, but we have to expand them more into related phrases within relevant and varied content, not simply throw them into the mix like too much salt!

Rich Pages:
We still need to build keyword ‘rich’ pages around the main topic and related concepts. Still, instead of repeating keywords to a formula as we used to, we now need to find keywords that make this page relevant for as many searches around a concept as possible. The richness of the content is as essential as the richness of the key phrases. We still need keywords to build a concept, but it is now more important to include terms with relationships to the main topic. When someone lands on your page about a topic, there needs to be enough scope and breadth of information. If users are satisfied when comparing it with competing pages, then Google should also be satisfied. Keyword research is still going to be important in search engine optimization of high-quality pages or planning a content marketing strategy. Still, these are not just single words used repeatedly.

The future of SEO is in forming key phrases that are more targeted and closely related to your specific business. If you are selling fresh fish in Melbourne, you should use key phrases such as ‘best fresh fish in Melbourne’ or ‘good fish deals in Melbourne’ far more than simply ‘fish’ or even ‘Melbourne.’ Just as people realize that internet activity is merely an extension and development of offline business, search engines require more meaningful and in-depth content from a website. The future of SEO couldn’t rely on single keywords, as there is too much competition, and the searching consumer needs more closely targeted results.

Content Analysis…And why it is essential!

Content analysis is a significant part of creating and maintaining effective web content. It is an analyzing approach and a process for evaluating your web content with respect to features like:

  • Branding
  • Usefulness
  • Relevancy
  • Usability
  • Tone and voice
  • Format
  • Delivery channel
  • Search Engine OptimiOptimisation

So basically, content analysis is a systematic analysis for summarising any type of content by considering these above-mentioned aspects. It enables objective evaluation of the content that other methods fail to provide. The analyses are in the written word, as in it is a quantitative method, but the answers of the analyses are numbers and percentages.

Although such analyses seem simple and raw, they serve two purposes:

  1. It removes the quality of the summary being based upon or influenced by personal feelings, tastes or opinions, as in eradicating subjectivity.
  2. To make the process of observing trends easy.

How would you know your content is good and effective if you don’t assess it regularly? So a content analysis helps in:

Apparent ROT (Redundant, Outdated, or Trivial content)
Content analysis helps you be updated with the latest trends in the market and remove all that has been outdated and not yet valid or up to the newest situation.

Cover Gaps
It allows you to identify any gaps or opportunities you might have missed in capturing or gaining your audience’s attention and put any content that might work towards nurturing your audience more.

Brand Messages
Content analyses make you prioritize important brand messages and put key elements more upfront. Brand messages update with time, and so should your content.

Competition
You can easily stand equal to your competition or even a step ahead if you analyze your content up to the current market trends.

Quality
It helps sustain the quality that allows your customers and clients to make positive decisions toward your brand.

The content analysis uncovers the causes of things expressed in the content through any medium. Still, an analyzer needs to focus on what exactly the cause is to be found through the analyses because a lot of content is going on. Even if you are specified with a particular field of work and analyze its content, then even there are no limitations to the amount of content you can get. So it is most important to stay focused on what you want to find out, what you want to update, and what should not change and remain the same.

So, in conclusion, content analysis is a process with significant importance in all fields and all parts of the world. Whether you reside in Melbourne, Australia, or any part of the world, whether your field is marketing, accounting, media, or science, every field generates content. That content needs constant upgradations according to the latest trends that are going on in that field’s particular market and the newest information availability; whenever you feel that maybe your website is not performing well or you are going to launch a new one that is the best time to complete a content analysis.

In Summary – Why it is essential! 

Modern algorithms are designed to analyze and favor quality content. There are a few ways that you can use this to your advantage. First, always provide unique and relevant text, which should be a given. Second, make sure that keywords are used in the title and header tags within the content. Use a keyword density tool to ensure you are at the perfect keyword density, less than 4%.

Long-string keywords are essential to include in high-quality content. Many searches for these keywords, such as “how to brush fluffy Siamese cat after bath” and similar. Because most highly ranked sites are not optimizing as much to these long-string keywords, even the smallest and lowest rated websites can get on the first page of results with these.

Do Not Copy Content From Other Websites 

One of the most surprising everyday things across Google and websites is duplicate content. When we talk about duplicate content, we are talking about the same range: in every possible way, word for word. For those you don’t know, this is a problem – especially when maintaining and delivering a successful SEO campaign. That is why it is imperative that you focus on ensuring that the content on your website is unique in every way – or you are going to pay for it.

But surely there is going to be some crossover? 

There is no question that, thanks to the millions of websites out there, there is always going to be some crossover when it comes to specific topics and industries. If you were to talk about rubbish removal, there would be a million blog posts and more clients in the industry competing for the exact words. So over time, there is going to be some crossword with particular words and phrases. Yet, to truly stand out from the rest of the crowd, you must focus on ensuring that your content is unique and fresh in every way – this difference will have a profound and positive impact on your SEO campaign. And we are not merely talking about the content on your websites. We are also referring to content in your title tags.

Why? What happens when you have duplicate content? 

Firstly, Google and other search engines don’t like it. So they do what they love to do best (apart from rewarding good white hat SEO tactics) – they punish your website and it badly. Having the same content over and over again dilutes your search engine ranking for important pages and, when excessive, may signal to search engines that you are spamming phrases and keywords.

So they hit your website hard with a drop in rankings. You’ll be pushed off the top spot and keep dropping. In the worst-case scenario, you will be entirely indexed off Google, which could be the end of your campaign.

But they copied it off me…

That happens! It always does. Duplicate content doesn’t necessarily mean you have copied content across – it could mean a rival or competitor copied it from you. There is always one way to stay ahead of this in case it happens:

  • Highlight content from your website
  • Paste and search it on Google
  • See what the results are

If it is just your site, you are in the clear. If not, you can see who has copied your content. It is a straightforward process to witness. Now, don’t worry. As we mentioned, there will be some crossover with words here and there. As long as it’s not “word for word,” – then you’re fine.

How do we avoid such harsh penalties? 

By staying one step ahead of the game.

Title tags are easy to deal with. Sign in to your Google Webmaster tools and go to HTML improvements. A ‘Duplicate Title Tags” section will tell you about duplicate content.

Finding identical or very similar phrasing can be more difficult. If there is a phrase that you fear is used too often throughout the website, simply search the site for it in quotation marks. This will give you results for that exact phrase. Slightly changing the wording should solve the problem. Remember that unique content will make all the difference for your SEO campaign.

 

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