Webmasters go through lots of different steps to try and
achieve good SEO for their website, and one of the key factors in any website's
SEO is the content. Blogs are great ways of keeping your customers up-to-date
with what’s going on in your company, which helps with engagement and in turn
helps maintain a good relationship. However, their best use is to help boost
your SEO.
Read on for the easy-to-miss mistakes to avoid that almost
every blogger or content marketer makes.
Commercialised Page Copy
One of the mistakes that is often overlooked by content
writers is that they are so keen on improving their SEO, they start writing
their blogs for search engines and not for their readers. A key word or phrase
in every single line is going to start to sound commercialised. It’s important
to structure your content so that readers are kept engaged and interested, whilst
making sure that there’s enough SEO friendly keywords and terms to help with
your rankings – but don’t ‘overstuff’ the article – Google isn’t daft!
Make sure the content is checked and checked again. Poor
grammar can harm your rankings, so grammar correction tools such as Grammarly
can help you make sure everything’s in order.
Internal Links
When people talk about optimising their SEO, internal
linking is a subject that’s often overlooked. Internal linking helps your users
navigate throughout the website easily and opens up more page crawling
opportunities for deep lying URLs. Correctly distributing your internal links
on high value pages to others can help distribute authority evenly throughout
your site.
Unoptimised Keyword
Structure
Keyword research is one of the most important steps you need
to take when forming your site's content, as everything that goes into your site
should ideally be linked by keywords and phrases that ultimately connect with
your main objective.
Remember, filling up your content with just keywords can
interrupt your readers experience and may leave the content feeling very
commercialised and lacking in feel. Your keyword density being too high can
sometimes qualify your content as spam, so keep an eye on this.
Images and Videos
Remember that our number 1 priority is visitor experience so
include images. However, concentrating on your text to make sure it’s perfect is
all well and good, but that doesn’t mean that your images and videos in your
content should go un-addressed. File formats and sizes that are unoptimised are
common mistakes that hinder SEO performance.
Image alt text should always be able to rank in a target
keyword search. This is where your keyword research again comes into play. Your
alt text is also important, as this is what is displayed by Google when the
image can’t be shown (this is also used with screen readers, so make it short,
descriptive and effective.)
Content Promotion
The simplest, yet most important phase of all is the
promotion of your content. You may have slaved away for weeks to get the most
perfect piece of content for your site, but if no one sees it, then what’s the
point?
Simple steps to promote your content correctly:
- Paid
advertisement campaigns on Social Media. These are becoming more and more
popular and rightly so; they’re a great way to directly display your content to
your target audience.
- Influential
person exploitation. Exploiting someone is usually a negative term, however
if there are people of influential standing in your business (or even a
third-party company) who can share your content then people are more likely to
trust their recommendations.
- Content
format. Maybe consider creating a video summary or infographic of your
content, as they are much easier to share and view.
Good SEO is always going to be a target, whether you’re a
greengrocer starting up a new company or a multi-million-dollar business, it’s
the first thing on your list.
With competition in the digital world being higher than
ever, webmasters are trying new, sometimes complicated methods to try and
better their opponents. However, when it comes down to it, the simple (and
often forgotten) ways are still the best.
If you’d like to know more, feel free to give us a call on 01502 478000.