SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is one of the most important parts of content marketing. A well-optimized, quality piece of content can help turn your website or blog into a valuable asset, and even bring in leads to your business. But with constantly changing algorithms, how can you be sure that you are being found. Take a look below for our six tips to ensure SEO success with your content marketing.
- Beware of keyword stuffing. It is not necessary to use your exact keyword repeatedly in order to ensure that search engines rank your content for that keyword. In fact, Google says that this practice will actually hurt your website’s credibility in their system.
Instead try to write quality content that addresses your readers’ questions in a natural way. Search engines are smart enough to know what your content is about, even if your keyword appears in differing forms and tenses. - Be sure that your keyword appears at least once in your opening paragraph, and in your title. These sections are some of the most important for SEO. Including a keyword here will signal to search engines that deals with that specific topic. If your keyword does not appear in your post’s title, and is only mentioned in the last few paragraphs it will likely be disregarded or minimized.
- Don’t be overly wordy, or too brief. A long blog post that is full of fluff and filler will only dilute your message. In the same way, a post that is so brief that it glosses over key points or elements will not help your readers, or help your website be found.
Instead, aim for a quality piece of content that is helpful to your readers and addresses any questions or worries that they might have, and use as many or as few words as are necessary. As long as you have more than 100 words, search engines will recognize a valuable piece of content as such. - Do not worry too much about the frequency of your content updates. While frequent blog posts are nice to have, they can lead to “writer fatigue” and end up diluting your content message. It is always better to focus on well written, useful content.
- When posting infographics or videos to your website be aware that search engines are not able to crawl non-text content. Always include at least a partial transcript of your video or image content. Also, consider submitting your infographics to databases like Visual.ly or Coolinfographics. These curated websites will help generate valuable clicks back to your website if your infographic is accepted.
- Use social media to build your influencer network, not your SEO value. Almost all social networks include a “nofollow” tag on their user submitted links. This means that the social network is signalling to search engines that they are not endorsing the linked content, and do not wish for any “SEO juice” to be passed through.
Instead, focus on building a thriving community of influencers who may choose to link to your content on their own websites, foregoing the “nofollow” tag and thus promoting your content to their readers, and to search engines.
To learn more about SEO, take a look at our blog post, Best Practices for Blog SEO and contact the MJ2 team to find out how content marketing can work for your business.
