SEO for Site Content

Quality content is the strength of your site

For every single topic you can find thousands of search results in search engines. In order to perform well in the search engines and stand out in the crowd the primary requirement is that your site should have quality and your own content. Copying the existing content helps neither the users nor the search engines and in long run your site will be marked as web spam by search engines and disappear in the search results. Contrary to this quality content helpful to the users will automatically become more popular with external linking and social sharing.

The point is standing out in the search engines at the same time providing quality content and there comes the importance of keywords. Writing quality content without high impact keywords is of no use from search engine optimization perspective. Look for different words a user might search for your content and make sure those words are appropriately used in Page Title, meta description and content of the page.

How to Analyze Keywords for Your Site?

Google AdWords Keyword Planner Tool is one such a keyword analysis tool helps you to find out variation in keywords with local and global search volume for each keyword. Since this tool is part of the advertising campaign you need AdWords account to use the tool though it is free. Use this tool and make sure the highly searched keywords are part of your content.

Another simple way is to use the top search queries which brought traffic to your site from Google Search Console account. This helps you to adjust your site’s content by understanding the preferences of the users. If you want complete in depth analysis of your content then Google Analytics is the best bet helps to identify geography wise traffic to your site along with top landing pages.

All of these tools are free to use and helps webmasters to optimize their content to fit best for the search engines as well as users. Following are the best practices consolidated for the benefit of webmasters to help providing a friendly content to user and search engines.

Use simple language in your content

Offering your content in simple and readable format will attract more users. For an English site, it is very important to use a simple words generally used by majority of the people instead of using jargons specially used in your local region. Note most of the users are not a native speaker of English and it makes very difficult for them to understand complex sentences. It’s always advised to stay around your content instead of writing each and everything on your site. This helps the users in great way that they are in a right place for what they are searching.

Update your site with fresh and unique content

While fresh content helps the existing visitors to come back it also brings new visitors to your site. Search engines also give priority to the sites which are getting updated regularly over the static content sites not updated for years.

Make content for users and not for search engines

The word SEO means optimizing your site for search engines and not creating your site only for the purpose of displaying top in the search results. Most of the top listed sites not primarily reached that position through search engine route. For example, no one will search for Facebook or a local news site in Google and that is the power of making content for the users. Below is the Alexa statistics for Facebook indicating only 3.60% of users are coming to Facebook through search traffic.

So it is clear that creating a site with easy navigation while offering visitor’s need is what you need first before optimizing a site for search engines.

Designing your content

Choosing appropriate navigation style and site layout adds more value to your content. Since hyperlinks are unavoidable part of a site, using suitable anchor text will ensure more visibility about the linked content. Anchor text is the visible text displayed for a link as shown below:

<a href="…example.html"> Anchor Text </a>

This text will inform the users and search engines about the linked page, hence use descriptive text to provide required information about the page you are linking. Also ensure proper colors are used to identify unvisited links, visited links and hover around.

Another aspect of content display is using heading tags to highlight important topics in a page.

Structuring an article

It is recommended to create content offline using text processing tools like Microsoft Word and then copy / paste the offline content to your site builder. This is an effective method helps to structure your content offline using appropriate headings and subheadings. Most of the popular site builders directly take the formatting from Word document without the need of restructuring again on the site editor. Below is an example of a structured blog post:

Dos and Don’ts:

Dos