Detailed Explanation Of How To Optimize Your Content

Watch Video: How To Optimize Your Content

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In this video, we are going to give an example as to how to optimize your content for search engines, as well as optimizing for your visitors. The reason why your content has to be optimized for your visitors, besides the obvious that your visitors have to get some value out of it, is because after the latest Google algorithm change, Google now measures the quality of your content by looking into a few factors, and this actually has a considerable effect on your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – we’ll get into this later in the video.

In this example, our primary keyword is “internet marketing company”.
We are also going to put this picture in our content.

First Thing First, your content has to be totally unique. This has been emphasized over and over again because there is a reason for it. In this videos, we are not going to go over the reasons, and what type of a content is a duplicate content because this is another topic all by itself. For the purpose of this video, we are just going to reiterate that important fact, that your content has to be unique.

Moving on the next topic, It is the Title Of Your Article

It is recommended that the title of your article should contain your keywords and preferably formatted with H1.

There is also another important topic regarding how to select your title, this again is another subject all by itself, and since we are focusing on the optimization of your content, we are going to move on to the next subject, which is keyword usage.

Keyword usage should start with, your keyword being in the beginning of the first paragraph.
Your article should also have your keyword in the last paragraph.
Besides the first and the last paragraphs, your keywords should be used throughout your article. Even though there are many theories out there about keyword density, none of those actually holds any truth, besides one known fact that keyword stuffing is a bad practice of content writing.

Then the question is, how do you know when you are stuffing keywords, or if you are using enough of your keywords. We are going to come back to this subject in couple of minutes…

As we are talking about the keywords, another question arises, some SEO professionals recommend to use variations of your keyword.

This actually may not hold any truth to it but you need to look at this subject from another perspective: Since you already have your keywords, and writing your article related to your keywords, the words  you should be using to explain your subject should semantically be related to your keywords anyway. Granted, some portions may loosely be related to your keywords (such as your analogies or examples, etc), but in order for your article to make sense, the words that you select to explain your subject matter should closely be related to each other, consequently to your keywords anyway.

When you are writing your article within this structure, you increase the relevancy of your article in great deal, and help yourself boost rankings in the search engines.

So, here’s the way your article should be structured;

You start your article with your keyword, and following words you select should naturally be tightly related to each other, as well as to your keyword.
When you expand to make your point in the following paragraphs, you start using words semantically close to your keyword.
Every time you finish, making a point in each paragraph or section, you tie everything back to your main keyword.
When you are giving your conclusion in the last paragraph, you again use your keyword.

Now, going back to the keyword density, as you should already realize, you use your keyword in the first paragraph, last paragraph, and every time you expand on your subject as you tie it back to your keyword. So however many times you expand to make a point, that’s how many times you are using your keywords within the body of your article, plus two more times. So in reality, there is no structured keyword density per se.

Moving on to the next factor; Meta Description of your articles…

Even though the meta description has no SEO value any more, it is still an important aspect related to the listings in the search results. Since the meta description appears in the search results, it is recommended to use keywords in a compelling meta description to increase click-through rate.

Just as Meta Description, Meta Keywords hold no SEO value any more, especially after Bing took over Yahoo Search.

One last word about keywords is, making the keywords or important phrases bold and italic does help your SEO.

Another important optimization factor that you should consider in your article is the internal and external linking. It appears that the ranking of your article improves when you link to internal pages of your website from your article (preferably with your keywords being the anchor text), just as well as  linking to external sites from your article. One important element that you should pay attention is the relevancy of the pages that you are linking to, which they should be relevant to your article to gain the boost to your ranking.

Four more important optimization factors we need to reiterate.

The first and the second ones are the page title of your article, which is also closely related to the URL of your article within your website.

The page title of your article should contain your keywords, along with the URL of the page that your article is on within your website. Furthermore, to improve optimization, it is better to use hyphens to separate your words in your URL.

The third factor is the optimization of your images, which also has an important effect on your visitors experience with your article. It is no secret that images have positive effect on your visitors, and articles with images rank well in the results. Yet you should also implement optimization factors in your images as follows:

Your images should have Alt Attributes as well as Titles, further more the file name of your images should also be related to your article, and should preferably contain your keywords. Though it has not been tested, we go further with this optimization, and implement keyword related information to the Properties of the images, which are the Subject, Title, Tags, Comments, Copyright, and also mark the image Rating with five star.

Last optimization factor, which I mentioned at the beginning of the video, but definitely not the lest important one is the reactions of your visitors. After the latest algorithm updates, Google started looking at quite a few of these and implementing them as optimization factors. These are the elements such as, if the visitors are coming back to the site, how long are they staying on a particular page, or if they are avoiding that particular site in the listings, if they are avoiding that particular site when they are doing their search… where these factors started gaining importance.

As you can see, optimizing your articles has come a long way and it is not only putting keywords in the title and throughout your article anymore. Nevertheless, besides the technicalities of optimization, good read is a good read and it should provide value to the readers… which is what the search engines are trying to provide to the users by technically trying to separate the good read from the bad one.