Content is one of the most important parts of SEO, only if the content has SEO value that is. People can throw together blog after blog but if those blogs are not optimized the correct way, they will not do much for your search engine ranking. There are steps one can take to make sure their content is of value for SEO. This post will explain how you can evaluate the SEO value in each piece of content you produce.
How Google Determines High-Quality Content
Google’s algorithms are always changing, meaning they constantly update how they are looking for relevant content. Yet, there are two human inputs that can affect how your content shows up in search results that do not change like Google’s algorithms.
These two inputs are behavior analysis and quality raters. With behavior analysis, Google looks at how the website visitors interact with the content. They take note of how long users are on the page and average together each user’s time spent to see how successful the content is for readers. Quality raters are hired by Google to manually check their search results.
Keyword Targeting
Before beginning your content, you should know what keywords you are trying to optimize for. Keeping these keywords in mind while writing will help you naturally incorporate them into the blog. Adding in keywords after you are done writing will not be as effective since it will be harder to make them flow throughout the writing.
Keyword Choice
When deciding which keywords to use throughout your content, make sure they aren’t keywords that are extremely popular within your industry. Using the same popular keywords as other websites will not help you rank higher than them. Think of long-tail keywords that are very specific and relevant to what your business does.
Headline and Meta Data
When creating a headline and meta description for your content make sure your keyword is included within the first 65 characters of the headline and anywhere throughout your description. This will tell Google what your content is about, and it will also be the first thing searchers see in the search engine results page.
Body of Content
Although incorporating keywords into your content is extremely important, don’t base your entire writing around those keywords. If you do that, it will make the writing not flow as well. This could result in your readers clicking off the page. Also, if you include your keyword too many times within your content it will be flagged by Google as keyword stuffing, which is not good for your sites SEO.
Content URL
Google also looks at pages URL’s to determine what the page is about. It is best to also add those keywords into your URL as well as remove any unnecessary characters from the URL. A URL should look clean and easy to read. For example, you want a URL that looks like www.getfoundquick.com/blog/ rather than something like www.getfoundquick.com/shdof-shT42=aslkd/blog/26484.