Search engine optimization has progressed a lot from the days it sufficed to publish anything and everything on your website and expect good rankings to a stage where SEO has become an intricate balance of sophisticated science and perceptive art.
In the current context where the race for the top spots in search engine rankings has become extremely intense, both digital marketers and content producers need to understand how search engine algorithm works, the impact of the main ranking factors, search intent and motivation, and more to be able to publish high-quality, relevant, and valuable content with high user-appeal that is liked enough by Google to get preferential rankings.
As per searchenginejournal.com, to ensure top-quality inbound leads and profitable traffic coming in via user search, you would need to focus on strategizing your site’s content around robust SEO.
Digital marketers must appreciate online content that has a vital role to perform in addition to providing information – it should allow better discoverability by search engines, or be SEO-friendly. Some useful content tactics you can use to get better search engine ranks than your competition:
Appreciate the Factors Involved in Search Ranking:
Unless marketers understand what factors search engines look for in your content for the ranking process, they will not be able to beat the competition in the battle for page rankings. The most important factors that Google considers for allocating ranks are content, site structure, links, and HTML tags.
Content:
As far as Google is concerned, content is priority number one for ranking search results. The most important factors are it should be well-written and of very high quality, should demonstrate authority due to good research, incorporate the keywords in a seamless and appropriate manner, should be relevant and timely, enhance the user experience with the use of images, videos, audio clips, and other graphical elements, and also answer the query in a direct way. The best contents are those that are comprehensive and cover all the dimensions of the subject well.
Other factors:
Other important ranking factors include links, site architecture, and HTML tags. When search engine bots crawl your site to index the contents, they also take into account non-content elements like the use of keywords, URL structure, site architecture, inbound links, and coding best practices. The faster search engines are able to crawl and index your website, the faster, SEO practitioners can see the effect of their fine-tuning on the search results and traffic volumes.
Use Appropriate Keywords:
With search engines becoming smarter by the day in figuring out the search intent of users, there has been a fair amount of debate regarding the continued importance of keywords. However, most SEO experts seem to agree that keywords are far from dead and are still a very important element of SEO. By undertaking keyword research content managers can determine the topics people are interested in, find out the search volumes of different topics, as well as get an understanding of the difficulty they might face in ranking well for a specific subject.
The most effective way of making your content rank well is to include a unique keyword in every content piece. Also, remember to identify and use natural variations of the primary keywords or Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords. The best way to go about the exercise is to first identify issues within your industry that people are interested in and then conduct an intensive keyword research exercise so that you can figure out the best possible ranking opportunity.
Obviously, the nature of the keyword will depend on the topic the content is focusing on. The nature of the content piece should influence the kind of keywords being used. For example, blog posts are ideal for including long-tail keywords that have low search volumes and hence less competition while pillar pages that are more comprehensive in their coverage should target shorter seed keywords even though both the volume and the competition are higher. You may consider connecting Social Market Way.
Figure Out the Search Intent:
Once a viable target has been identified for including a primary keyword, you need to validate it and decide how to compose it by finding out about the search intent. It is vital to understand what the user is really looking for when they feed in a query in the search box and then compose the content in a way that satisfies that need.
Typically, when a user searches for something, they usually try to do one of the following four things; find information on something to answer a question, learn how to do something, locate a particular resource, or find a specific location that he wants to visit.
Before starting to compose the article, it is important to know what the searcher wants so that you can evaluate the content that is achieving top ranks at the moment for the specific keywords so that you can validate the category. Study the content published by your competitors to find out how they have structured the information to specific searcher requirements.
Give Top Priority to High-Quality Outbound & Inbound Links:
Links are great for telling users and search engines quite a lot regarding the reputation, quality, and value of your content. While you decide to link to certain outbound sources in the pillar pages or your blog posts, you need to ensure that they are top-quality trustworthy websites. While looking for backlinks, focus your attention on websites that have a reputation for being an authority on the specific topic your content is all about.
You must never forget that backlinks to your site’s content are a crucial factor in terms of site traffic and Google rankings. High-quality backlinks could go a long way in boosting SERP rankings and driving more traffic. Spam and low-quality links could adversely impact your site’s rankings.
Learn about Technical SEO Top Practices & Site Structure:
Even though enhancing technical SEO and optimizing site structure doesn’t seem to be an essential aspect of a content writer’s job responsibilities, it is critical to have an idea about all these factors that could be affecting your ranking ability.
The way your website is built, crawlability, security, page load speed, etc. impact directly the search engine’s capability of indexing and ranking your content accurately and in a super-fast fashion. If you are having some technical SEO mistakes and poor site structure, it becomes almost impossible for you to obtain a ranking for your content irrespective of the fact that it has been well-written.
Conclusion:
You must consider implementing an SEO-friendly content stratagem right away. Use the tips discussed above for optimizing your SEO content.
Learn more about how your business can effectively outrank its competition online. Reach out to Dignitas Digital to get your customized digital marketing plan today!