If you want your website to get noticed, one of the best ways to do it is by producing relevant content that will draw people to it when they are looking for goods and services in the search engine rankings.
The obvious place to start is to have pages and articles that contain appropriate keywords and phrases, which no longer always have to be exact replications of the search term used. We can be thankful for this, as old search engine optimisation (SEO) practices used years ago of crow-barring such words and phrases into text looked ugly.
However, there is far more to it than just having the right keywords. This is because SEO has become increasingly sophisticated, with various elements being added and adjusted as search engines like Google have updated their algorithms repeatedly.
This doesn’t mean keywords don’t matter, but the days when you could gain an advantage by repeating the same keyword many times in an article (keyword stuffing) or adding lots of keywords (spam) have long gone. Such methods are now penalised by search engines.
Best practice
What you should do is include your target keyword in your title tag and meta description. But beyond this, you have to consider factors other than keywords. After all, if it were just about keywords, there would be no way of deciding which articles could make page one of the search rankings.
This is one reason for other factors to be important, but other elements are relevant to anyone who reads the content. For example, content needs to be high-quality, readable and relevant.
If it is not, people will soon navigate away from your site, or ‘bounce’ – and the frequency that this happens is known as bounce rate. A high bounce rate will harm your ranking.
You can use some great tricks to improve your content ranking. One of these is to break up the text with images. It is important, however, to remember that these must also be relevant and high quality. Embedded video can be even better for SEO. Viewers are more likely to stick around and read the content if they can also watch something relevant and interesting.
Another key factor in SEO rankings is authority. According to Search Engine Journal, this is one of ‘three pillars’ of SEO alongside relevance and experience.
This is an increasingly sophisticated area of assessment, but what matters is that you are offering content that will satisfy the curiosity of your client, such as telling them how they can meet a particular need or solve a certain problem.
Gaining authority and trust takes time, which is why you need about six months of regular content for even the best content to make page one.
The importance of page 1
Ultimately, reaching page one is vital. Research has shown that about three-quarters of searches never get past page one of the Google search results, so ‘nearly’ is not good enough.
Getting SEO right is not easy, especially when it is not just about content, but other website features that constitute ‘technical SEO’, from download speeds to mobile friendliness – and much else.
That is why you should always seek out expert help, ensuring that your website’s content can show up on that all-important page one.
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