SEO Content

The most important task in getting search engines to recognize you is to have a lot of people visit our site.  To do this, you want to offer quality SEO content that offers the reader valuable information.

The catch is, you also must give the search engines what they want.

To do this, most websites take the route of starting a blog.  No matter the industry, every business has something they can write a blog about.  Anything from trade secrets to menu updates can be written about to increase the content on your page.

Keywords

The first step to publishing good SEO content is to write a keyword list.

Write a list including all the words related to your business you can think of.  This will be your master list.  Use this when writing your articles.

Next, you want to write ‘Core Content.’  Core content are your first three or four posts.  They will be longer than future articles and should discuss subjects that are most important to your business.

To get started writing, you should prepare an outline.

Outline

Writing an outline for SEO content purposes is a bit different than you might be used to.

After you decide on a topic to write, comb through your keyword list for the words that best match the subject.  Put these keywords in the order that will best get your point across.

Don’t put your keyword list away thought.  Instead, use it as you write.  You’ll want to try and use one word from that list in EVERY SENTENCE.  This is especially important in your core content.  The more of the keywords you use here, the higher you will rank in Google and other search engines.

Headings

Now that you’ve written your post, you need to put in your headings.

Headings accomplish a few things.  First, they make the article more pleasing to the eye and therefore more appealing to the reader.

Secondly, headings make search engines know you are designing your website in the fashion people expect.  This makes them more anxious to move you to page one.

Please note, a heading is not simply bold text.  You want to go to into your text editor and select Heading 1 or Heading 2.  This is the indication to search engines that a heading is there.

Metadata

Metadata is not as technical as it sounds.  It is the text you see under the title of a webpages when you are scrolling through Google, Bing or Yahoo.

It is important to enter this information manually to earn respect from the search engines.

Yes, if you do nothing then text from your article will appear in this spot.  But if you do not do it manually, the search engines think you are not taking them seriously and therefore will push you further down the list.

Whichever program you are using to build your website, they will have a place to enter the metadata.

Links

The last step to ensuring good SEO content is link building.

Though we discussed this in Part 1 of our SEO Series, it is worth touching on again here.

First, like I did in the last sentence, you should link back to previous posts that are related whenever possible.  Search engines like when your posts are linked to, so this will help the earlier post more than the current one (but hey, it’s still your site).

Additionally, you should start a link building campaign.  A link building campaign is when you find ways to have other websites link to yours.  This is easier said than done.

We will not go into the specifics of a link building campaign here as that deserves an article unto itself.  I recommend after you get your core content posted and begin writing follow up articles, look into link building to really get that last bit of SEO juice.