When it comes to Search Engine Optimization, you need to make sure that your content is perfect for its purpose. A small mistake can be enough to re-contextualize a keyword or put a link in the wrong place, and everything counts when you’re trying to build up your website’s search rank.
Know Your Audience
Keywords are the most important part of any text or article. Even if you’re not using any links or special terms, you still need to understand what kind of things your customers will search for.
Let’s use searcharoo as an example – as an SEO site, the most relevant keywords would also be SEO-related. However, the phrase “Search Engine Optimization tutorial” or “How do I do SEO?” would be much more likely to draw somebody in than “How do I make my website better?” since they’re more specific. This will make it more likely to appear for people who are actually searching for SEO services and maximize the number of potential customers or users that’ll see it.
Your audience demographics matter, and you can’t expect to bring them to your site if you aren’t writing something they want to read.
Make Your Keywords Fit
Ideally, keywords should also fit naturally into your content. Even this very article has phrases like “SEO services” in it, but they blend right into the text rather than sticking out. If people feel like they’re reading a biased article or blatant advertisement, they’ll usually stop, regardless of whether you’re actually trying to sell them something.
While a lot of content pieces are written purely for the links, search engines are still getting smarter. A content piece might not get read by a living person, but crawlers and robots can still pick up on the quality of each piece, especially if you’re using duplicated text or putting keywords in contexts that don’t make sense.
Know What You’re Talking About
One of the biggest problems with modern SEO is the number of articles that are written “off the cuff”, with the writer making it all up as they go. This can work in certain situations, but most of the time, it’ll lead to the content being vague, basic or even flat-out incorrect. As you get into specialized territory, it gets harder to fake your way through it, even if you think you know what you’re doing.
Research is important. You don’t have to spend hours putting together a single piece – you can even just look up existing articles and pull together information from there. The less accurate your content becomes, the fewer people will trust your information, and this can have a huge negative impact on your site’s reputation.
There’s also a less obvious benefit: if you’re writing correct information, you’re likely to include words and terms that are related to the topic at hand. Articles about telematics will mention vehicle fleets, pieces about films will mention actor and actress names, and so forth. Even if these aren’t your keywords, they can serve to drive more people to your content, drawing more attention to your site through related search terms.
