The complete guide to optimizing content for SEO (with checklist)

April 21, 2017

Like in many other areas of life, on the internet, content is king. So it’s important to know how to produce the best type of content for your site so it can be found and indexed by search engines and thus viewed by the most people possible.

The following are four starter tips on how to achieve this and whip your web pages into SEO shape.

SEO your content strategy – Work out what your users intent is, what information they are looking for, find a keyword from your keyword research that best fits such a need and then craft your content around such a keyword.

So start with your keyword in mind rather than just trying to “piggy back” or “shoe horn” the keyword into your blog post after your typing is done. Knowing what type of questions/search queries a user will type to find your article, will help you out in the long run.

Helping your audience solve problems whilst optimising so it can be found by search engines is a great double header.

Design good content – Write with your users in mind and not search engines. You want your content to be engaging, easy to understand, entertaining, have clear navigation to other useful resources and so on. Such well designed content will help engage your audience, keep them on your site for longer and build trust and rapport.

Create correct content – Avoid typo’s, spelling mistakes and bad grammar as they are often a turn off from a user experience. Instead make sure your content is edited and clean and link out to useful resources so both the user and search engines see you as a trusted source with their best intentions in mind.

Check your keyword usage – Avoid keyword stuffing (not cool), use natural language and variants of your target keyword without bashing people over the head with it. It’s very boring reading the same keyword stuffed repeatedly into an article. It’s a big turn off to users and Google is wise to it so don’t do it.

Key Takeaways:

Content should be shareable and designed for easy scanning, using bullet points and highlights, for example.
Content language should be engaging and simple, without being simplistic, or condescending.
Like all good writing, content should be researched, fact-checked and grammatically accurate.