- Guest Post by Sara Lancaster of No.2 Pen -
You bought the domain name, you have a website design you love, and you’ve hired a trusty SEO consultant. Now you’re missing just one thing: web content that’s search engine friendly.
While SEO-friendly web content development might sound scary, it doesn’t have to be. Search engine optimized content can be created in five steps.
Step One: Calibrate Keywords
The keyword phrases you choose in your content matters, a whole heck of a lot. Determine how your prospects search the web for your product or service, and then naturally incorporate those terms into your content by assigning two to three keyword phrases to each of your important pages.
Some say you need a keyword density of 2–5% per page, but there’s no hard data to support these recommendations. Instead of worrying about density, use those target terms in your content naturally.
Step Two: Know the SEO Content Development Basics
Keywords are fundamental to SEO content development, but they’re not the only part of your content that can make a big impact on SEO. You must also consider these SEO content basics:
- Use a minimum of 250 words on your most important pages, please.
- Headlines and sub-headlines are good for visitors who want to scan the copy and for telling the search engines what your page is about. Therefore, it’s good to include your keywords in your headline and sub-headings.
- Put your most important content at the beginning of your web page. Think like a journalist thinks and put the inverted pyramid to good use.
- Incorporate keyword-rich anchor text/links into all of your pages. Links serve as a roadmap for the user, and—guess what?—links tell search engines what a page is all about.
Step Three: Complement Your Content with Images and Video
The web is powerful because you can easily incorporate pictures and video into your content. Therefore, it’s a good idea to write your content with complementary images and video in mind. This is great for the user experience – it really drives home the message you want to send. After all, pictures and video are important pieces of SEO content, too.
Step Four: Get an Outsider to Help
Many people believe that search engines are becoming capable of determining how well content is written, the idea being that poorly written content results in a poor user experience. So put another way, search engines may penalize you for poor grammar, misspelled words, etc. At least some day.
It’s best to hire a professional web content writer to write and/or review your content for you or to ask a couple people outside your day-to-day operations to read through your web content and provide feedback.
Step Five: Check Your Analytics – Test Your Copy Like You Test Your Design
You need to be looking at engagement stats in your website analytics data. If your company blog has an article with a really high or really low bounce rate, try to figure out why. If your new sales page has better time-on-site stats than the page it replaced, good. If it doesn’t, time to switch things back…or at least re-work the content.
If you approach web content the way you do any other important aspect of your business, you’re guaranteed to find success. Good luck!
Sara Lancaster is the voice behind No. 2 Pen, a website content writing company. She specializes in helping businesses sound sharp on the web.