What more can I say that hasn’t been said already on this blog and which hasn’t been written in my forthcoming book The Good SEO Guide – Understanding The Basics. There’s only so many ways to get your content creation right and helping to sell it, but just for the hell of it, here are a few tips:
- Pick Your Audience – It’s always good to know who you are targeting and what they would be interested in. Kind of makes sense, no? Giving people what they want is always the best way to convert.
- Make It Useful – It’s not enough to produce content & people to come. Indeed if you follow all of these rules, they will, but if you make it useful, you will benefit from side effects, such as sharing and backlinks.
- Research Keywords/Phrases – Don’t just write blind, make sure that you create titles with specific and likely search terms in mind. Direct hits on keyword combinations or phrases are optimal in ranking.
- Structure Pages – Start your blog posts, web pages or anything else with an H1 and follow it on properly with further titles and paragraphs. With no H1 you are creating an impediment to natural search traffic on your site. Beyond this , use tags properly and efficiently.
- Annotation – Part of SEO is about building well crafted HTML and accessible content. To this end ensure that your links, images and other embed content is annotated correctly with TITLE and ALT attributes as required. Include those all important keywords, wherever possible.
- Avoid Duplication – Don’t duplicate content across your site, multiple sites or amongst a network of interconnected sites. This is why I get annoyed when people hijack my content. Within your own site and domains, alert spiders to duplicate content on different URLs by using META link tags.
- Alternate Content - Graceful degradation is a buzz word people love to throw about in web developer job interviews. What it means is, whatever you do, if pages don’t load properly the fallback is elegant. For example, without flash, make sure there is SEO-friendly content that can be read by spiders and users a like. In essence, build actual HTML pages with content!!!
- Auto-Build Sitemap – Every time you write to a blog, or site, make sure the XML sitemap is auto-updated and the search engines pinged to alert them. There are lists of URLs to ping online, so if you are building a custom system, definitely hunt around for them.
- Promote It – If you are lucky your content will sell itself via Google or any other search engine, but you should definitely still promote it, either via social media or by making sure it gets onto the streams of content aggregators, this will feed back into your search engine success.
These are 9 simple rules to remember when developing your content. Over the last 10 years I written a shed load of articles, and blogs and had varying success with creating popularity.
Different things work for different content, whether you are writing a blog, content for a museum collection website, or developing for your eccommerce site, so there isn’t necessarily a hard and fast rule. Just find something that works, and do the basics right!
Go forth and conquer!
Web-head & art collector, living in East London and huffing on the fumes of the planet since '78. Here are my thoughts.
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