Here are some important factors to consider while crafting content to improve your SEO Ranking.
Spending time on developing a well optimized SEO content ranking strategy can lead to more site traffic, conversions, and sales over time. Without Search Engine Optimization, people won’t be able to find your site, and all your hard work will be for nothing. Here are a number of important factors in terms of crafting a strong strategy to impact structure, organization, and the overall quality of your content to help improve SEO.
- Outbound Links – Simply linking your website to another website. If you think visitors might like to learn more about a specific subject or product and you don’t want to offer that specific content yourself, send them over to someone who does. If we all link to the sources we consider best, it helps build transparency and everyone benefits in the search results! ie Do outbound links matter for SEO?
- Internal Linking – An internal link simply links from one page of your website to another page. For your website to rank, it needs original, relative content, and links. Google locates your pages and posts best when they’re linked to on the web. Internal links help create a structure and hierarchy for Google bots to crawl and index. A great example of this is a related post or product section.
- Include the Focus Keyphrase in your introduction. Good content is based on user experience and providing a focus keywords, keyphrase right off the bat will help visitors understand what your page is about. Remember people scan websites so make your intro captivating, concise, and to the point.
- Keyphrase Length – A good rule of thumb is 4 -6 words. Any more can jeopardize readability.
- Keyphrase Density is the number of times your focus keywords, keyphrase occurs in your content. In order for Google to match a user’s search term with the best fitting web pages, Google needs to understand what your page is about. Keep in mind not to over use the term(s) because it can be an annoyance to users. Remember over use can signal to Google that you’re over optimizing which can negatively affect your rankings. A good rule of thumb is < 12.
- Include Keyphrase in the meta description.
- Keep Meta Description length to around 155 characters. Read our article on meta description best practices here.
- Try and use a focus keyphrase only once. The idea is to not compete with your own posts and pages. The fancy term for this is called keyword cannibilization.
- Include Keyphrase in headings / subheadings – Headings and subheadings help organize information for users to easily read and understand text. In addition, they identify page structure and what parts are important. By including keyphrases in headings, you signal importance. Like any of these items, do not overdo it and focus on organized, clear, and readable text. Keep the range to 40 – 70%.
- Keyphrase in Page Title and URL: – include the exact match of the focus keyphrase in the beginning of the SEO title as well as in the page slug.
Reference
Here’s the holy grail straight from Google. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide