Keyword Research
Before you start creating your content think about the topic you want to talk about. What is your audience interested in?
What answers can you provide them with? Will writing about this topic bring you closer to your goal?
Once you have decided what topic you are going to write figure out what keyword phrase you are going to use for the basis of your topic and form your content around that phrase.
It is very important to understand the keyword you are trying to target.
Doing a little keyword research in the beginning can help a lot in terms of figuring out whether or not that keyword will likely rank well or not and help you achieve your goal.
Creating content with highly competitive keywords can make it much more difficult for your page to rank well than using less competitive long tail keywords.
Title
Make sure the keyword phrase you are targeting is in the title of your page. when writing a title try to keep it between three and seven words long with the keyword at or near the beginning of the title.
Description
When writing your description use your keyword phrase in the beginning and keep your description within 165 characters in order to make sure the full description is visible in the search engine results.
Body
When writing your content use a minimum of 300 to 500 words. The closer you can place your keyword phrase in the beginning of the content the better.
try to use your keyword/s on average between 1% and 5% in your content. I feel that 1% is sufficient.
You don’t want to over use your keyword/s though because search engines will feel that your content is unnatural and being created more for ranking than giving those searching for your content what they want, and it may affect your ranking negatively so try to keep it below 5%.
(Remember, targeting less competitive keywords and keyword phrases will help produce better ranking results than using a single highly competitive keyword.)
Links
Add a hyper link at or near the beginning of your content. Your links should come from within your keyword/s and link to pages related to your keyword/s and topic.
Try linking to internal pages that closely match your keyword/s at least 70% of the time, and not directly to your home page.
So if you have one post on SEO and another on On page optimization linking the two posts together is much better than linking those posts to unrelated topics or to a home page.
Use hyper links in about 1% of your content or once for every 100 to 150 words.
Anchor Text
Having proper anchor text in your content can help strengthen the keywords on your site and make your content look more relevent to search engines.
When a search engine such as google sees that you have written a keyword rich post on why content marketing matters! and then sees another website link to your post through similar keywords such as the importance of content marketing it helps validate what your content is about and can help boost your ranking.
Here is another example of what a proper anchor text looks like
Correct anchor text: This a good post to read on why content marketing matters
Incorrect anchor text: This is a good post to read on why content marketing matters
Secondary keywords
Use secondary Keywords to help maximize ranking for a particular topic.
So if you use SEO for beginners as you primary keyword phrase and On page optimization tips as your secondary keyword your page will be optimized for the search engines to see SEO for beginners as the most important topic/keyword phrase on your page and you will be more likely rank well for that keyword.
The secondary keyword will also be considered important but not as much as my primary.
The point is to have alternate keywords so that you can drive traffic from multiple related topics.
This can be good for targeting additional keyword phrases that people may be looking for in order to maximize the possibility of your page ranking well in the search engines.
Tip: Scribe is a great tool to significantly simplify your SEO work.
It searches your content and provides you with important SEO data that you can easily implement on your site to help you maximize your search results and build good links.
Do you have any great SEO tips that you’d love to share? Put them in the comments!
This post is part of the seo school series.