One of the most important parts of creating content is ensuring that you’re optimizing your content for search engines. Content creation is one of the core components in search engine algorithm calculations. By generating new, useful and relevant content, you’re increasing the likelihood of increasing organic traffic to your website and improving its visibility. Search engine optimization (SEO) involves various specific strategies tailored to your business and if done wrong, it may even harm your website rankings. Follow these crucial steps to ensure that your content is following SEO best practices!
Do: Conduct Keyword Research
Keyword research is an essential part of optimizing your content for SEO — it helps you improve your site’s visibility and drives traffic toward it. You can begin this process by using powerful tools, such as SEMrush or Google Ads Keyword Planner to help you find the most effective keywords in your industry. By identifying and implementing the most relevant and high-potential keywords in your content, you’re optimizing your website to be ranked higher in search result pages.
Don’t: Keyword Stuff
Relevant keywords in your content are crucial for SEO, but overusing them can harm your rankings. This practice is known as "keyword stuffing." which produces spam-like content that sounds unnatural and harms the user experience. Google defines this practice as overusing keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate rankings in search results. Search engines will penalize websites that use this practice by lowering their rankings. To avoid this, focus on creating high-quality, user-friendly content that incorporates keywords naturally and strategically. This approach will help improve your rankings without sacrificing the user experience.
Do: Create High-Quality Content:
When it comes to SEO optimization, quality is king. Original, relevant, and high-quality content is essential to attract valuable leads to your business. Tailor your content to your target audience by creating content that is going to resonate with them, address their pain points and speak to their needs.
Best practices for content creation involve producing pieces that are
Relevant
Useful and Credible
Valuable
Engaging
By following this criteria, you’re producing content that will establish your website as a trustworthy source of information, position your brand as an industry expert, and improve your search engine rankings.
Don’t: Forget the Importance of Images
Images are an important addition and a great compliment to any piece of content. Not only do they add visual appeal but it also enhances readability for the user. Optimized images play a critical role in improving your website's image search rankings and on-page SEO. To ensure that your images are tailored for SEO, it’s important to choose high-quality images and save them in the correct file format. Don’t compromise your site speed by uploading large files — therefore, compress any large files being uploaded. Aside from that, including relevant alt-text is also a crucial step for well-optimized images. A best practice is to keep it a maximum of 125 characters and include a keyword.
Do: Conduct Regular Site Audits
How frustrating is it when you’re navigating a website and encounter slow loading speeds and broken links? These issues can quickly lead to high bounce rates, which negatively impact your website's engagement and search engine rankings. Avoid this by conducting regular site audits. By performing routine checks on your website's performance, functionality and user experience, you can identify and resolve issues at the root before they impact your data.
Don’t: Neglect Mobile Optimization
Neglecting mobile optimization is a costly mistake. Mobile SEO has become a hot topic in the world of SEO over the past few years. Failing to provide users with a seamless experience can lead to a loss of potential converting traffic. With more users relying on their mobile devices to conduct searches, it's essential to provide them with a mobile-friendly interface. That being said, a website that looks good on a desktop may not be compatible with a mobile device. Therefore, overlooking this step may cause users to experience slower speeds, unresponsive designs and overall leading frustrated visitors to bounce off.
Do: Remember to Include Links
Links are another crucial aspect of SEO that should not be overlooked. Two types of links to include are internal links, which guide users to other parts of your site and create a crawlable link structure, and external links, which lead users to relevant and authoritative external content. While the goal is to keep users on your site, including external links can establish your credibility by referencing trustworthy sources. Make sure to only include valuable and relevant links in your content to improve your site's SEO.
Don’t: Forget to Use Unique Title Tags and Meta
Descriptions
The title tag and meta description are fundamental components of SEO that search engines rely on to generate snippets for the search engine result page (SERPs.) These elements play an important role in informing users whether the content is relevant to their search query. That’s why it’s important to use unique title tags and meta descriptions that entice users to click on the link — overall, increasing the chance of attracting organic traffic to your site.
Follow SEO Best Practices for Better Results
To achieve better results for your website, it is crucial to adhere to SEO best practices. Failure to do so puts your site at risk for decreased visibility and lower search rankings — in other words, leading to less traffic to your site.
At Lau Marketing, we understand the importance of implementing a strong SEO content strategy and have extensive experience creating content that follows guidelines. Our team is here to help you meet the goal of driving organic traffic to your site. Contact us today for a complimentary consultation and take the first step in improving your digital presence.