Why good SEO content is important

Of course, once you have designed that awesome website that shows off your product or service, you would like to sit back and see the sales rolling in. Unfortunately, things are not quite so simple. For people to find you among the millions of websites that are out there, you need to ensure that your website shows up high on the Google rankings. How do you achieve that? By making sure you provide the right (SEO) content.

These days, it is generally understood that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is not just about stuffing your website full of keywords. Google has become a lot smarter at knowing which websites offer good, informative content. In order for Google to find your website, here are some useful do’s and don’ts to help you improve your SEO content and rank high up there:

The DO’s when writing SEO content

DO write interesting, unique content for your website that includes relevant words and phrases. Try focusing on those long tail keywords, as these usually consist of a question they want to see answered. Need some inspiration? Use AnswerThePublic.com to get insight into questions your target group may have.

DO make it easy for people to like and share your content, as creating links is another important aspect of your SEO. Creating links will help you drive up those Google rankings. Social media is of great importance here so make sure you have those like and share buttons.

DO keep adding new content to your website, by adding new products and services, writing regular interesting blog articles, or adding interesting news snippets. Not only does this keep you at the forefront of your customers’ minds, but it also improves your SEO. Make sure to provide quality and NOT quantity.

What not to do when writing SEO content

DON’T use keyword stuffing, in your content or META description, as Google considers this “spamming” and it can negatively impact your ranking. Also, people have become more informed about SEO too and can detect that so called ‘keyword stuffing’ easily, because it effects the readability of your content. So not only does Google dislike you for it, it annoys your visitors too.

DON’T try to hide keywords on your page by using the same colour text as your background; Google will find it and it is considered ‘cloaking’, which again affect your rankings in a negative way.

DON’T use too many different keywords, or keywords that are too generic, in your content. For SEO to work, your keywords must be relevant and specific, otherwise you will end up with no visitors at all.

What comes next? The easiest way to measure the impact of your SEO content and how effective your SEO is, is to use Analytics. It will show you on-page information about how long people stayed on your site, what they looked at and much more.

However, Analytics won’t show you your organic keyword ranking in Google. Give us a call here at Whello, because we can help you out with this part.

Optimising to the most important keywords

When users search in Google, they enter keywords. Whether this is done on a keyboard or with the voice recorder: at all times keywords are used in order to present you with the results for your search query. Now, the idea behind SEO is that you want to be found for those keywords. How? By actually using these keywords on your site. For example, let’s say you own a bakery store in the city centre of Amsterdam. When someone searches on “Bakery Amsterdam”, you want your website to be listed in the search results as well. Sounds pretty straightforward, right? Well, it’s not as easy as it seems. As a website owner you must show (e.g. inform, trigger, convince) Google that your page is relevant to this search. After all, Google’s main responsibility is to provide its users with the most relevant information.

Write clear content

By now, you should get the idea that Google uses keywords when presenting the search results to the user. The next thing you should understand is that these keywords actually need to be found on your website. As we all know websites are composed of visual, textual and technical content. The keywords you want to be found on need to be integrated in all of these elements. When writing textual content you’ll need to make sure there’s a balance between SEO-optimised texts and readability. After all, if you stuff your website with certain keywords this will come at the expense of the user experience. In practice this will lead to a higher bounce rate. As Google keeps track of how long visitors stay on your website it’ll get a message your site appears to be less suitable than initially thought. This will result in lower rankings as visitors apparently don’t appreciate the website they have been proposed.

Linkbuilding

One of the most important SEO techniques has always been link building. Because search engines basically want to treat all websites equally, it is difficult for them to see from the outside which websites are more important than others. One way to estimate the relevance of a website within a certain domain is to count how many other websites refer to a certain source. Therefore, looking at the amount of links is one of the ways in which search engines can get a clue of which pages are more relevant than others. Although initially only the amount of links played an important role, nowadays the authority of these referring websites play an equally important role. For example, if there is a Wikipedia article about a popular topic, and your website is listed as an important source, then Google values ​​your content more than that of your competitors without Wikipedia’s blessing. As we all know, Wikipedia may be considered an important source for whatever kind of information.

Well-structured metadata

Writing a convincing text based on particular keywords sounds pretty straightforward, but how does this work for the technical part? In a nutshell, consider the optimisation of metadata as the correct use of the titles (just have a look at the most upper part of your screen), URLs, breadcrumbs and internal links. Why each of these has become so important in modern SEO? Don’t forget search engines use robots, also known as crawlers or spiders, to scan your website. These spiders need to rely on technical data in order to rank a website. A neat and optimised meta structure ensures that robots can better understand your website. With empty or simply bad metadata, Google is less able to understand what your website is about. The completer and the more accurate the metadata, the more probable your website will be placed higher within the search engine results page.

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