SEO Content 101

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When it comes to improving how your website ranks in organic search, SEO and original content go hand-in-hand. Best practice, white hat SEO techniques make it easier for search engines to crawl, index and rank your pages. Check out this Prezi for some basic on-page SEO fixes…

5 basic fixes for better on-page SEO on Prezi

Humans and robots

Any content you produce for your site and the web in general needs to work for two audiences. The human beings you want on your site should see useful, interesting and well-ordered content that makes them trust your brand and want to become a customer. But your content also needs to work for SEO. It needs to be easy to find and easy to understand for the crawlers, so that Google and other search engines can put it front of those very human visitors in the first place.The majority of web journeys start with a search and, perhaps more tellingly, the majority of purchase decisions start with someone tapping a query into a search engine (in Australia that’s almost always Google). That means where you rank can make a big difference to your bottom line.

SEO content and keywords

Developing SEO content that works for your visitors and for the search engines can be something of a balancing act. You’ll want to include the keywords you’d like to rank for, but you’ll need to do it naturally and sparingly. Cramming your meta-tags full of keywords and repeating them over and over again in text buried at the bottom of the page won’t get you any closer to your goals.Effective SEO content combines original material and skilful writing to produce pages of relevant, useful information that include not only your target keywords, but also a wealth of synonyms and related terms.Google’s algorithm, with its 200 or so ranking factors and its constant updates, is getting smarter all the time. One of the big shifts in the last 10 years has been the ability to spot keyword-stuffing. Jamming your target terms into otherwise irrelevant blocks of text will be spotted a mile off.

Your content strategy

Effective SEO content can help you improve your rankings, get more people on your site and push them towards your conversion pages. If your site is an important part of your business, you need to develop an appropriate content strategy.This strategy should identify the different types of content suitable for your site, your budget and your objectives. It should include both static and dynamic content and it should have best-practice SEO techniques at its core.Your static pages will provide valuable information to your users that doesn’t date or need replacing all that often. Your strategy should include a schedule for adding more static pages to your site, as well as reviewing and updating existing pages.The dynamic element of your strategy will provide shorter, timelier articles, with new content added on a daily basis. While these articles will have a shorter shelf-life, they allow you to benefit from trending topics in your niche and tap into the QDF (Query Deserves Freshness) element of Google’s algorithm, which provides a little extra boost to new content.

Getting SEO content right

There are plenty of ways to get SEO content wrong – something that applies to all elements of your online marketing strategy. Getting it right requires a content strategy that fits your organisation and the resources to create a regular flow of quality, relevant and SEO-friendly pages to add to your site.