6 Tips On Making Your Content Search Engine Friendly

Optimizing your content for search engines is a vital piece of the SEO puzzle. Content, whether from your blog or web pages consists of text and images that are crawled by the search engines, catalogued and later evaluated. Through a series of algorithms, they use that evaluation information to rank web pages from most to least relevant. Your company’s goal of course,  is to get your content ranked number one! Here are some content marketing tips on how to  accomplish that:

Title tags

Put the keyword where it really counts- in the title. You want the keyword to be available for SEO, and to be a prominent aid to help viewers zero in on their interest.  Take your main keyword and add 3 to 6 more words to come up with what is known as a “long-tail keyword”. The entire long-tail keyword (the main keyword plus the one or two more relating to it) should be no longer than 70 characters.

Meta descriptions

While the title tag is short and succinct, the meta description is broader and more descriptive. Re-use the long-tail keyword here and expand upon it. For example, a long-tail keyword might be “headphones over ear wireless”. You can expand on that in the meta description with something along the lines of “Acme company’s highest quality wireless, Bluetooth enabled, over the ear headphones with excellent fidelity”. Part of content marketing is pre-qualifying your viewers by providing specificity.

Useful URLs

Utilize URL’s that both make sense to the reader, and are SEO effective. The first part of a page’s URL consists of the site’s address. The rest of it might be a string of nonsensical letters and characters, or it could make sense and be SEO friendly. Consider a page whose content is about digital watches for expeditions. Its URL might be watches.com/xicl5xx9%. That makes no sense at all and its only purpose is as an address. You could change it to, watches.com/watches-digital. That’s better, but try taking it up another notch to, watches.com/watches-digital-expedition. By adding accurate descriptions of the content you let the search engine and website visitors know exactly what the page is about.

Optimized images

First of all, you need to understand that search engines don’t recognize images. Even if text is included in an image, the search engine will register only a blank spot where the image resides. It can, however, see what is known as the “alt text”. Alt text’s original and main purpose is to decode an image for screen readers, (software used by visually impaired people, that reads text aloud), and consists of a description of the image. Search engines do understand alt text, which is an added reason to make it descriptive and clear.

Internal links

That all-important word, relevancy, comes into play once again when it comes to internal links. Inbound links prove the relevancy of a topic- including links that go to a different page within the same website. There’s the added bonus of guiding readers down paths that keep them within your website. Use internal links when they make sense.

You might have noticed a theme throughout these tips. Good SEO not only helps your website rank high in search results, it also provides a satisfying experience for your audience. Start with high-quality content, then give it the tools to rank it at the top of searches, and you end up with features that keep the viewer engaged and interested. There is more than one reason to employ content marketing to fine-tune your content for maximum SEO results.

Image: PCTechMag

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