SEO techniques may sound a little funny for the New Year. But content and search engine optimization is still hand in hand. You wonder what’s the point of high quality writing that will probably just end up on page 25 of Google’s search results, and nobody is going to go that far into those pages. If your material isn’t worth the read, and doesn’t serve that purpose, your page rankings will not do you much good.
Being the online writer, the key to create quality content that people are going to want to read and for search engines to want to index it. If you do this right you are bound to feel successful on the web. Follow these next couple techniques to work into your digital marketing plan.
Using A Calendar — Planning is very important especially when you are the online marketer! This is why you need a content calendar, when creating this it enables you to plan and visualize the writing activity for the year. It will let you be able to plan around important dates, and maintain publishing consistency, which is very important for readers and SEO.
When creating this calendar it also forces you to research topics and your keywords. Since you’re the one writing all your headlines in advance, you have the view on your content, and it’s unlikely you will repeat yourself. If you do this correctly your pages and site will start to attract and retain more visitors then you had before.
Creating Outlines — Creating your detailed outlines for your blogs and articles in advanced it does save you time, effort and enables you to structure your content for better readability. Makes you think about the message that you are trying to convey in your SEO writing, and can help avoid you from fluffing. Your outline will contain the three elements: a SEO headline that will pack a punch, a hierarchy keyword subheading, and the main message.
Writing To Your Viewers — A lot of business today are still churning out articles for search engines. Yes SEO really does matter, but finding you content and engaging with it are two different things. For example, a prospect runs a search and comes across your page, opens the page up, then reads the first two sentences and scans the rest of the page. SEO doesn’t buy your services, products or ideas the viewers do. If you have highly optimized content that is unpersuasive, incoherent or boring, your SEO writing is going to look like it was written for search bots. You want to write for your prospects, and optimize your content with good keywords when you are done.
Incorporating Keywords — Everyone in the business world should know the value of using keywords. What they don’t know is that how you use them can affect your rankings and user experiences. Looking at it from an SEO perspective, keywords are not as important as they use to be, but relevance, density and prominence do matter. The questions you need to be asking yourself are:
- Do you have main keyword(s) in your heading and at least one subheading that are close to the beginning as possible?
- Have you been able to maintain a safe keyword density?
- Have you incorporated LSI keywords or long tail phrases?
These are important questions to ask, so you can see what you are doing correctly and what you’re missing.
Using Pictures — This wouldn’t be considered a writing technique, but it can bring your SEO writing to life. Using images to complement your text can increase the likelihood that readers will read and engage with your content more. Everyone is naturally drawn to pictures. Picture quality is very important! If you have pour quality images this can potentially turn away readers and potential customers even. Using images can boost your SEO and if you do this correctly you can generate traffic and boost those rankings up.
For more information about SEO techniques contact Windy City Strategies!