I keep hearing about the need to write quality content to improve your search rankings and generally improve your SEO. Why wouldn’t you want to write quality content in the first place? Last month, I discussed what a good time it is to revisit your website and give it a tune up to make sure it’s optimized and working for you to help generate revenue in 2015. This month, let’s discuss optimizing your content to reflect the new realities of what good content looks like.
New SEO Rules Emphasize Quality Content
I’ve written a lot about SEO and changes to SEO over the past several years. SEO techniques include those practices that web content writers use to boost the chances their website or blog will be easily found by searchers. Over the past couple of years we’ve seen a shift away from the focus on including specific keywords in our content.
Keywords used to rule the search engines, so our SEO focused on the use of specific keywords in the content we wrote and the websites we built. Then Google shifted its focus to what people are looking for when they enter search terms in a search engine. Google set out to match information seekers with the best possible search results to their particular query. And the most efficient way to do this is to focus on content.
As people got used to researching everything from lawyers to recipes on the web, they stopped using single keywords and began using phrases, such as “South Broadway accountant” or “attorney IRS experience.” These phrases are called Long-Tail Keywords. Google responded in kind by demanding that business websites provide more detailed information about what they actually do; in other words, put out the information their clients and prospects need, and more importantly, are actually searching for. Of course, this also helped the search robots determine what a business does for indexing purposes.
Though many marketers and CEOs are focused on search engine ranking when determining ROI, there are other things that should be looked at if you are serious about optimizing your website or blog. Here are just a couple suggestions:
