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How to Optimize Your Content for SEO

When you write for your audience, you want to do more than entertain with engaging prose and inform with thorough research. You also want your content to appear higher on the search engines than similar material. That’s where SEO comes in.

Search Engine Optimization, also commonly known as SEO, is the practice of crafting webpages with your content’s search index in mind. The webpages can include your blogs, funnels, and other activities.

In general, your SEO, particularly with Google, is determined by several main factors. These include:

  • The content and quality of your website. Your content needs to be on-topic and relevant. Just listing “marketing consultants” repeatedly in an article that’s actually about something entirely different won’t help you. In fact, it might even harm your overall standing. Mindset for writing meta descriptions and SEO images to boost your post are helpful tips to attracting awareness.
  • The results of its own “crawling” of your website. In this case, “crawling” means the process by which the Google bots read and evaluate your text. This relates back to your quality. The bots tally the amount of time a particular search term appears in your website and indexes this against other factors.
  • Finally, you’re ranked on how many times you’re referenced on other sites. These may also be known as referrals. If many pages are talking about your site and linking directly to it, Google will notice this and raise your indexing.

Making the Most of SEO Best Practices

You should also keep in mind that, as the internet evolves and changes, these rankings will shift. The algorithms to determine relevance are also shifting, and Google is increasingly relying on additional methods to determine search rankings. These include:

  • Bounce rate – how often a user visits the page and leaves shortly after,
  • Content depth – whether or not your site is mostly just repeated articles or duplicate content,
  • And overall site friendliness – loading speed and mobile compatibility are the main factors here.

Beyond this, you will also want to take the following into account as you write top-notch content with SEO in mind:

Write With a Punch

Remember, most good content writing does not call attention to itself with meandering sentences and academic-sounding language. It simply fulfills its role of providing valuable information and keeping readers engaged to the end.

Fortunately, doing just this does not have to be a challenge. Keep your paragraphs short. While there is no hard and fast rule for the exact number of sentences that makes a paragraph, you should aim to keep yours under five at the very most.

Also, remember to write in active voice rather than passive voice. Not only is active voice more readable, it also tends to use fewer words, which in turns gets your point across much more quickly.

As a refresher, active voice looks like this: “The website lagged during the big sale.”

Passive voice, on the other hand, reads like this: “the website was slowed down by eager shoppers during the big sale.”

Link to Reputable Sources

Ever read an article that offered a really good statistic and want to look it up for yourself, only to realize that you couldn’t find a source for that stat to jumpstart your research? Do not let your readers suffer the same! Boost your authority and SEO by providing hyperlinks to excellent sources. Good sources include nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and academic websites. Avoid linking to direct competitors and personal blogs.

SEO Keyword Research

One of the most important parts of SEO is keyword optimization, also known as keyword research. Keyword research is exactly what it sounds like: you must research and understand the terms that your target audience is most likely to search and then strategize how you can use these terms in your content in ways that are engaging, creative, and natural sounding.

Remember, the goal of SEO is to understand which of these terms will net the most traffic and then incorporate it into your page. Ideally, you want to have the term repeated throughout your page, but not in a way that makes it obvious. For example, in this section, the word ‘SEO’ is referenced multiple times. Importantly, it’s repeated in the title and major headers of the content.

It’s also a good idea to include the relevant search term within the first few sentences of your page, as these will be shown as a preview of the content in the search engine results.

Engage 2 Engage is Here to Help

Remember this is simply a basic overview of tips to optimize your content for SEO.

Engage 2 Engage is here to help remove the headache from figuring it out so small businesses and entrepreneurs can focus on building and expanding their business. By delegating, we’ll help you develop and implement an optimized content SEO strategy plan. Learn more about our programs today!

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