QuickStart Guide to Content Optimization: Better SEO Content & Keywords

CATEGORIES: Papers   ///   03 Nov 2008
TAGS: Content Optimisation Agency, Content Optimization Agency, Keywords, SEO

Our latest best practice paper doesn’t beat about the bush.  Nope.  It’s our QuickStart guide to Content Optimization and how to radically improve your Search Engine ‘Indexibility’ (…and hence your SEO) by creating better, more search engine friendly web site content.

Without further ado….

Why Keywords & Content Optimization are so Important to SEO

The New York Times published a great article a couple of years ago that totally nailed the question of why Keywords and Content Optimization are so important to search engines. The piece was written by a reporter who was coming to grips with the fact that he was no longer writing just for his editor and his readership ….but also for a new, third reader called Google.

Here’s his leader: “Journalists over the years have assumed they were writing their headlines and articles for two audiences — fickle readers and nitpicking editors. Today, there is a third important arbiter of their work: the software programs that scour the Web, analyzing and ranking online news articles on behalf of Internet search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.”

It’s a great introduction to how and why we need to rethink our web site content in order to make it perform better for SEO.  In short, creating SEO-friendly content requires two changes to everyone’s writing habits…

1: New Types of Keyword Research

In order to understand and address an audience via search, it’s critical to understand the language that they’re using everyday on Google. In other words, instead of just crafting witty headlines, a large part of the creative work becomes a matter of aligning what you want to say with the langauge that you know your audience is using. Tools like Google Suggest help us do this Content Optimisation research with pinpoint accuracy.

2: New Types of SEO Content Skills (Content Optimization)

Google (and others) ‘read’ web content in certain ways. For example, page titles, the things that sit in the top (grey) bar of your browser window – are extremely important. Google takes them as an important indication of what your content is all about. From a technical perspective, most good CMS’s will take this title from the headline that you give to your page. At the same time, Google prefers to read blocks of title text that are 70 characters or less. As such, the scope for creativity in headlines is somewhat changed…. And this is just one Google ‘reading quirk’ amongst many. (Don’t worry, we’ll explore some more of them below…)

As such, if we want our content to be more attractive to search engines then these two thoughts – keywords and good content optimization – should inform every single piece of content that we generate for the web.

That’s it for the theory – let’s take a look at how it’s all done.

Keyword Research:  How to Do It

Your aim is to structure your content using the words that your audience is using to search the web – so that you improve your chances of featuring on the first couple of pages of Google in relation to a given search query.

For example, if you’re in the business of IPTV and your audience is searching around your backyard using phrases like ‘IPTV content management software,’ then you need to align the language you use to describe yourself with these terms.

At the same time, you need to be aligning yourself with a set of keywords in a ‘win-able’ arena amongst competitors: some keywords will have no competition, others will be red hot.

In simple terms, this last point creates a ‘keyword index.’ You need to place a calculated bet on where you want to play. Your choice should be calibrated by the following formula:

Volume of daily searchers on any given key word

(…divided by)

Volume of other web pages that are optimised around those keywords

You want to engage with as many people as possible that are using search terms related to your products / services. At the same time, you want to position yourself where you can compete, given the resources you have to hand.

The challenge is best illustrated by a quick experiement….

If you’re in the business of software apps for sales support, you might choose to optimise around the term ‘CRM.’ This would currently give you an audience of 563 searchers per day on Google. Unfortunately, it would also put you in direct competition with 129 million other web pages that are optimised on that term. Alternatively, if you were to focus your keywords around the concept of ’sales management software’ you’d have a total audience of around 50 searchers a day; and using this route, you’d be up against approximately 150,000 other pages.

Clearly the chances of capturing the attention of a ‘sales management software’ searcher are far more likely than for a ’CRM’ searcher…

But choosing keywords is not just a question of running the numbers. Other branding considerations are also essential to a successful keyword strategy.

For example, you need to consider the following things…

• You brand equity – what’s does your overall investment in non-web language mean to this work? What about your sales patter and your product naming conventions? Do these things fit with your keyword findings?
• Market maturity – does your current searching public really reflect where the market is at? Are you leading them or following them? What stage is your market in terms of possessing a common body of language to describe its problems and requirements?
• Influential people – are industry analysts setting the market terms? Or are they just spinning far-fetched yarns? Do you need to follow or ignore them? What influence do they have on your customers? Will this influence matter tomorrow? Has it already had an impact?
• Your resources – can you afford to compete in hotly competed areas? If you have a mega-budget, why not just nuke it out? If your resources are small, can you find smarter keyword arenas to play in?
• The quality of the data sample – if you’re playing in niche territories, are you willing to bet a keyword / naming convention on a sample of 10 searchers per day? Once your product category matures, how are the trends going to change?
• The state of the nation – can you afford not to play in competitive fields?

The above questions should create an interesting debate where branding ideas meet public perceptions of you and your products and services. But ultimately, your keyword choices should be determined by your gut feel and your resources.

Content Optimization: Writing Good SEO Content

Once you’ve established your keywords, you then need to integrate them within your web site content.

Here’s our QuickStart guide for good keyword implementation.

Technical Page Content Optimization Tips

Here at C&M, we always use a CMS for our client sites. We choose these apps carefully, and always ensure that they let us do some essential Content Optimization and SEO-related things from a technical and functional page perspective… Because, for good SEO content, there are a bunch of things you really have to do at a technical page level:

• Edit each of your page titles independently. Your page title is the thing that will be printed at the top of a browser window (in the centre of the grey horizontal bar, next to your minimise/maximise buttons). You should try and make this title brief – around 70 characters or so, relevant to the page and peppered with a few important keywords or phrases. This is because, like us humans, crawlers tend to use ‘titles’ as a good indication of what the page is about. (NB: don’t go crazy on the keywords! The page title MUST be readable and easy on the eye to humankind as well!)

• Edit each page’s metadata descriptions. This is the stuff that Google uses to describe you when it displays its results (ie, it gets used as the blurb that sits underneath the page title link in Google’s listing for you). As such, this field should describe the page, include a few keywords, and also a call to action like ‘read more’, or ‘find out more’ or ‘get your free offer here…’ etc. (Think about it – this globbet of content is really, really important – this is your ’sales pitch’ on a Google results page…. so a call to action is a good thing to draw people into the click.) This text should be around 160 characters or less. Anything more will get cut off at the knees.

• Edit each page’s metadata keywords/tags. Whilst this used to be important, it’s not any more…. but you ought to do it as a matter of good practice. Here you should list all your relevant key phrases, separated by a comma. This could be a big list, or it could be small…. whatever you think appropriate. You should note however, that this metadata field isn’t really used by search engines as a measure of importance or relevancy any more. It does, however, give them a clue about who you are and what you’re about.

• Use keywords in your navigation schemes wherever possible. Also use them (sensibly) in important on-page functional items like buttons, pull quotes, maps, and other such eye candy.

On-Page Content Optimization Tips

So much for the functional and technical stuff. What about the writing? Here’s my ultra-condensed guide to producing good, SEO-friendly page content….

• Make your content chunky – use header tags to split it into bite-sized paragraphs that are easy for crawlers and humans alike to read and understand. (ie, header, para, space; header, para, space, etc.)
• Use keywords in them there headers wherever possible, and wherever it adds value to the process of scanning or skimming the page.
• Create as many internal links in the page as possible, whilst still retaining a (human) reader’s focus. Use keywords in the descriptive link anchor text (if you’re using a half decent CMS, then you ought to get prompted for this). This anchor text is basically a descriptive label. It tells a crawler what your link is about. Hence, if you’re in the business of CRM systems, then your internal link from your home page to your products page ought to include an anchor text that goes something like this: ‘XYZ Corp’s CRM Software helps mere mortals sell ice to eskimos.’ In other words, use a bunch of sensible internal links to help a crawler find its way around your site and learn about what you do in the process.
• Create as many external links as possible. Use the same approach to anchor text as described above. Whilst internal links are important to help a crawler scoot around your site, external links will help them understand what kind of other web sites you associate yourself with. So, if you’re in the business of selling small handheld computing devices, make sure you link out to popular media sites that cover this topic and also other vendor sites that compliment you (and even compete with you). The more popular these sites the better – your goal is the bask in their sunlight.
• If you’re blogging, or using a CMS that uses blog-style principles (and of your front end design houses them) then use categories and tags for your posts/pages wherever possible, and try to infuse some keywords in there whenever you can. As per the points above, these navigational elements help crawlers to understand how to navigate your site and understand who you are in equal measure…. just like they help us humans.
• Put your most important content at the top of the page. By important I mean the stuff that’s full of useful keywords, headings, and links. Save the waffle for later in the page. (Like us, crawlers get bored easily.)
• Think of your page as a hierarchy of content. In fact, think like a robot in a hurry. Big, important words go at the top in big important heading styles. Weave linkage into this important stuff wherever you can, and try to ensure that this linkage reinforces the big keywords in its anchor text. In other words, keywords get kind of scored in order of descending importance, depending on where they feature in your content: from page titles down through primary navigation, headers, body text links, bold text and boring old plain text.

All You Really Need to Remember About Keywords and Content for SEO…

In sum, all of the above illustrates that crawlers basically read the way that we humans do – they scan the page and pick out key phrases and content elements to get a sense of meaning. As such, good SEO content should also be good to read…. and to be able to write it is to have a good level of empathy with readers and crawlers alike.

If you’d like to know more about all this new-fangled SEO Content Optimization stuff, then just call us.  We’re an Online PR agency that specialises in just this sort of thing :  )

Meantime, if you’d like to just dive on in and get going on some Content Optimization work, then we recommend you check out our recent paper on Online PR and Content Optimization tools for the masses…

 

CATEGORIES: Online PR Agency Resources, Papers   ///   03 Nov 2008
TAGS: Content Optimisation Agency, Content Optimization Agency, Keywords, SEO