As a business owner, you probably know how important it is to create content for SEO that not only helps your website rank well but is also representative of your brand and of course, attractive to your audience. After all, who can tell what your business is about but you? Giving your audience your own impression is definitely something you can manage if you have the time and resources to do so.
For this reason, we want to share some basic principles of SEO applied to content that you should definitely incorporate at the moment of creating your own articles and publishing them on your website. Understanding these principles will also help you at the moment of working with external collaborators and determine if their contributions are useful not only for your audience but also for search engines.
Create Content for SEO Using The Keywords Properly
One of the first things you need to determine when you want to create content for SEO is the keyword you want to rank for. See that I’m talking about THE keyword, just one. Even though you could use some other keywords in your article, it is important to base your writing in a single keyword that, of course, serves as a topic for the whole article.
You’ll probably find a lot of SEO experts out there and a lot of different opinions about using your keywords. I recommend that you should not use more more than than one keyword on posts not more than 400 – 500 characters long.Make sure that the keyword you want to rank for is present:
- In the title of the blog
- The first paragraph
- The first header
You could have it placed in other parts of the article but I don’t believe you should unless it’s strictly necessary for grammar purposes. The three places listed above should be more than enough, again, for an article that doesn’t exceed the 500 words.
It may sound obvious but you should be very careful not to fall in what is known as keyword stuffing: using keywords randomly, making no sense just for ranking purposes. And even if they are put in a way that is grammatically correct, doing so will backfire in the long run. Plugins like Yoast are very useful on this matter because they will warn you when you’re using keywords excessively.
Going Beyond the Written Word
The keyword you want to rank for should go beyond the title, first paragraph, and header. This is something many business owners ignore and it’s good to highlight. If you’re posting a blog (or assigning someone to do it) you need to make sure the keyword is placed in the images too. This is known as Alt Text. No matter what CMS you’re using, whether it is WordPress, Hubspot, Magento or Squarespace; you’ll find a way to add Alt Text in any of them. And you should definitely do it.
Content Matters, and you Know It
It’s 2020 and as a marketer and business owner, there’s no need to remind you that your content needs to be fresh, relevant and original. It is also true that most of the time your own business is time-consuming enough to take care of this crucial aspect of digital marketing. A hand-in-hand strategy with your digital marketing agency is a common and definitely effective way to keep your content’s quality in a time-efficient way.
Alt Texts are the manner in which search engines locate the photos as they browse through your pages. Not including them would be like making pictures of your blog invisible to Google and others. And you definitely want to rank not only on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) but on Image Results as well. Additionally, an article that features not only good looking and relevant but also Alt Text optimized images can definitely rank better.
You should also add the keyword to name the image file. For example, if you want to rank for a keyword like ‘SEO agency’, Call your ‘seoagency.jpg’ image file. If you need to add more than one picture, instead of using numbers but symbols like dash or period it is strongly recommended. It is also advisable to ensure that the image does not exceed approximately 800 pixels, to ensure that the media does not affect the loading time of the page and thus the experience of your user (and thus your SEO).