SEO Best Practices: High Quality Content

Today we’re discussing SEO best practices. When you’re trying to get a handle on “how to do SEO”, you’ll often find articles that refer to “old” SEO practices versus “new” SEO practices.

One well known historical (i.e. “old”) method of Search Engine Optimization includes dominating search results by stuffing keywords into titles, domain names, URLs and content. Now, it’s much more complicated, factoring in social engagement, social shares, the ‘weight’ of the incoming links, the amount of time (seconds and minutes) that visitors stay on your site versus bounce rate, etc.

One SEO ingredient that seems to be staying in first place on a consistent basis, and probably will remain there, is ‘high quality content’. Such content is defined differently all the time, but here’s a nice quote by Miranda Miller that describes it perfectly:

When the purpose of your blog posts, press releases, website copy or other content is to attract people to your business and convert them to customers, your content needs to offer them some value, by way of informing, convincing, or entertaining.

You need to add value for your readers by writing and sharing clear and concise information that they’re looking for, by helping them see you’ve provided a solution for their problem, or by just simply making it enjoyable to spend 10 minutes reading your piece of content. For tips on how to create great content, check out our previous post on how to write great blog posts.

Poorly written content is an SEO technique that keeps rearing its ugly head all over the Internet. SEO “experts” write low-quality content overflowing with keywords and promise their clients that they’ll achieve first-page rankings. Sadly, this isn’t the case. Google is concerned with one thing: serving the most relevant and high quality search results to the user in a timely manner.

SEO Best Practices Call to Action

Here are some questions to ask yourself when developing your content marketing plan:

• Who will create the content for my website? Am I doing it myself or will I be outsourcing this task? If you decide to outsource this task, make sure you see samples of their work.
• Who is your target client? Who are you writing this content for and why? Your copy should reflect the answer to these questions.
• Do you know what your keywords are? If you are writing your own content, are you worried that it will be boring and bland because you’re writing about the same thing over and over?
• Do you know how to measure the results of your SEO? Do you understand industry lingo such as bounce rate, conversions, etc.?