Pairing great content with search engine optimization (SEO) is the best way to draw people to a website. Content is a term for anything on a website that the creator wants an audience to see. For any content to be “good,” it should be relevant to what the audience is searching for and able to hold their interest.
These days, creating good content is just the starting point for anyone who wants to grow their online audience. The internet is competitive and content creators face stiff competition in virtually every niche. To give a piece of content the best chance of standing out from the flood that rises higher every day, the creator must optimize it for search engines. Creators need SEO to make their content more relevant and easier to find by the people they want to reach.
Is SEO Important?
SEO is essential for driving traffic to a webpage. Content creators must use SEO techniques to create content that will get the attention of their target audience. Examples of SEO techniques include keyword research and optimizing content for certain keywords.
Driving traffic to content usually means making sure that the content appears at the top of online searches. Most online searches are conducted on Google, so a good position or ranking on Google search results pages is particularly desirable. The position at the top or near the top of search results pages indicates that the content is relevant. Good content is essential for the success of landing pages, blog posts, ebooks, and product pages.
Creators Must Understand the Goal of the Content
The word “relevance” comes up a lot when discussing SEO. The point of SEO is to deliver content that is relevant to a search engine user’s intent when they enter a search term. The content on a webpage should be developed to serve a specific purpose — to meet the search engine user’s need — which is what makes it relevant. If the goal of a website is to sell a product, creators will need to tailor its content for precisely this purpose. The content on that site will need to create awareness, and/or encourage leads to convert.
Understanding the Audience’s Needs is Crucial
To know the goal of the content, the creator must know what the audience is seeking. What do they want from the content? If a creator knows what problems their audience is trying to solve and what solutions they have already tried, they can provide better answers.
Content Should be Well Organized
Content organization is another big part of SEO. Content creators should give their content a logical structure and ensure its quality is high. The point of well-organized content is to make it easy for search engines to find the information their users need. A sitemap can be a great tool for guiding search engines and their users to relevant content. The easier the content is to find, the better the website’s search engine performance will be.
Keywords Should be Assigned or “Mapped”
Keywords are the backbone of SEO, and keyword mapping involves giving pages on a website target keywords. It is usually best for each page on a website to get its own set of specific keywords to indicate its purpose to search engines and visitors.
Descriptive Headers Are the Backbone of Well-Structured Content
Content should be structured to allow easy skimming. People want to get to the most relevant content in as little time as possible so they tend to skim content to find the information that is most important to them. When they do this, the headers in the content serve as their guideposts. Search engines also use headers to determine the relevance of content. When a creator organizes their content, they should divide the content into sections and use header tags with keywords in them to indicate what is contained in each section.
Appropriate Tone is Essential
The tone of the content should change depending on the industry for which it is created and the message it is conveying. The right tone affects how persuasive a piece of content will be. Persuasive writing keeps people on the site and makes them click through to more pages, which is another factor that can boost SEO. For example, a writer might adopt a friendly and familiar tone for a casual audience, or they might be more formal if the content is aimed at a professional audience.
The SEO tips above are tried and true strategies that content creators can use to optimize their content. Following these guidelines, creators can generate content that search engines will rank highly and that their target audience will find valuable.