SEO Content

About SEO Content

Ask almost any SEO expert and you’ll probably hear them say “content is king”. That’s because content is considered the single most important and powerful factor you can use to help your page get found on the search engines.

In the last couple of years, Google has made big changes to their algorithms to find good quality content and remove content which they feel is poor quality from search results. Essentially, without good quality content you have no chance to show up.

Before you start writing your content, it is important to do some keyword research so your content is targeting the best keywords that will give you the most traffic.

Just because a certain keyword sounds good to you doesn’t mean people are actually searching that term. Also, people search a wide array of keywords, so there might be quite a few that don’t come to mind.

Keyword Research

There are many tools out there that can help you get an estimate of the search volume for certain keywords. Google has a tool called “Keyword Planner”, which is mainly used for Pay Per Click advertising. You can use this tool to get an estimate of the search volume of certain keywords in order to get an idea of what the best keywords are to help you achieve your goals. The link to the Keyword Planner tool is:

https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner

Once you’ve figured out what keywords you want to go after, you can start writing your content. It is very important to take the time to do the research first, since SEO can be a time consuming process. You don’t want to waste your efforts on keywords that will not give you much in return.

Writing Content

Once you’ve figured out what the best keywords are, it’s time to create content that will attract the search engines to your page.

Creating high quality content is the single most important action you can take to influence your search engine placement.

Here are the key points to follow when creating your content:

High Quality Content

There are no shortcuts here. Make sure your content offers real value to someone wanting to get more information on a certain topic.

Your content needs to be engaging; ask yourself, would anyone spend time actually reading this? Share your content with knowledgeable friends or colleagues and get some feedback.

You don’t have to be a SEO expert to write good content. Assuming you are an expert in your field, think about it as if someone came into your office and asked you for information, would be able to answer their questions? Of course you could.

With SEO content, you are just putting your expertise down on paper, so to say. Your website is a reflection of you online, so make your content shows your expertise, and the search engines will reward you for it.

Unique Content

Make sure your content is unique. Copying someone else's content that you found interesting won’t help.

Search engines can tell if content has been taken from other sources, which will do nothing for you and it will end up hurting you since the search engines will actually penalize you for stealing content.

Keyword Rich Content

Referencing the keywords you’re targeting throughout your content will help you rank for those target keywords and phrases.

For example, if you are targeting “San Diego mortgage rates”, make sure you use that phrase, and different variations of that phrases in your content.

While this might seem obvious, it’s oftentimes overlooked. On the other hand, you don’t want to go overboard.

That is considered “keyword stuffing”, which will hurt your SEO placement since search engines will see this as an effort to game the system (not to mention, keywords stuffing hurts content quality).

Think about it from your audiences’ point of view: if you read something and see the same keyword/phrase used every other sentence, would you think that is well written?

Search engines see content in the same way. Make sure you reference your keywords, but not to a point where it just doesn’t sound right.

Keep Your Content Fresh

If the content on your page has been the same for years, then it’s time for an update. Search engines look for content that is fresh, so if your content hasn’t changed in years, search engines will just think that it’s not as relevant. That doesn’t mean you need to create new content daily (though that wouldn’t hurt), but going through your pages and just making sure everything’s current does help.

Google has something they call “Query Deserved Freshness”, which is an algorithm that rewards pages that talk about a timely topic.

For example, if there is a brand new loan program in the news, and you create a new page within your website for it, this page is likely to get picked up by the search engines as it has the freshest content available.

Also, it’s likely your competitors aren’t jumping on opportunities like this, so the search engines won’t be as saturated with pages competing for this new subject.

Organize Your Content

Instead of creating one page that talks about multiple topics, spread your content throughout multiple dedicated pages connected to each other using text links with keywords embedded in them.

When you have too many keywords on one page, you are essentially diluting the strength of that page.

When you write about a topic, dedicate one or more pages to that topic in order to give yourself the best chance to show up for the corresponding keywords/phrases.

Conclusion

The best part about SEO content is that you don’t have to be a SEO expert to be good at it. You just have to provide good information about the topic you are writing about.

In most cases, you are writing about topics that you are very familiar with, since you deal with them everyday.

By following these best practices -- writing relevant, unique, and fresh content -- you will have a great foundation for all your other on-page and off-page SEO efforts. Without good content, the rest of your SEO work will suffer.