5 Rules for Creating Great SEO Content for Your Website

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is not some marketing buzzword. It’s a vital part of any online strategy, and one that every brand should be paying attention to.

SEO is the art of attaining the best rank in search engine results pages (SERPs) when potential customers search for certain keywords. For example, if someone types web design agency in Dublin into Google, any agency based in that city would naturally want to not just pop up in the search results, but land in the highest page position possible as this is prime real estate in terms of getting customers to click onto your page.

Getting into that position though it’s not easy, I wish I could tell you otherwise, but it’s not impossible. It requires not only setting up the current SEO best practices, but also a regular and thought-out strategy that needs to be monitored and modified as you see results improving or not.

There are a number of things to consider, from image optimisation, to the speed of our site, on-site SEO, technical SEO, and more. But one very important element in all of these is writing regular and optimised content.

Here are five rules you can learn today for creating great SEO content that will help your website improve its organic rankings.

1. Know your keywords

Keywords are the words and phrases that people type (or say) into search engines when looking for products, services, and information. If you want your brand to show up on the results page when that happens, you’ll need to optimise your website for the terms customers are actually searching for.

This can be what is known as short-tail keywords, which are short and simple such as restaurants in New York. Or, it can be long-tail keywords, which are longer and more specific, such as what is the best vegetarian restaurant in London?.

The best keywords to focus on are usually not just the most-searched for terms in your industry, but terms that are often searched for AND that best match your products and services.

There are a number of online tools you can use to identify your keywords, one of them is the Google Keyword Planner.

2. Write for humans

We know that we are trying to Mr. Google to like us and put up at the top of the rankings, but we can’t just focus on this to achieve this (at least not anymore). There was a time when SEO was all about keyword stuffing and writing for the algorithm, but things have changed a lot since then.

Now it’s more about quality content, its structure and how valuable and engaging is, for your readers! You need to really focus on answering those key questions your audience is looking for. 

Search engines are getting better each day at spotting the quality of your content, and how they answer the audience’s needs, so you really need to know your audience, and what are they looking for.

Always write with your human visitors first, and combine this with carefully placed keywords and structure.

3. Be aware of ideal content lengths

Blogs and articles are a great way to weave more keywords into your website, but you do need to be aware of ideal content lengths.

Posting a blog that’s just 100 words long might save time, but it won’t be nearly as beneficial for your SEO (or your readers) as an informative article that’s several times as long.

On the other hand, a 2,000-word essay is generally too long for digital content. If you have that much to say, you might consider breaking it up into several parts.

At a minimum, you want to aim for 300 words. Roughly 500-600 is a great number to aim for, and you don’t want to go too far over 800 words at the higher end (and be sure to break it up with subheadings and images when you do!).

4. Where to place keywords

Once you have your keywords, you’ll need to naturally weave them into the content throughout your website.

Wherever possible, it’s good to use keywords in particular spots, which helps to let Google know what each page is about.

These include:

• The first sentence or paragraph of any copy
• Headlines and subheads
• Meta data
• Hyperlinks
• Image captions and alt tags

5. Link to other content on your website

An internal link is any link that connects your content (like a blog post) to other pages or blogs on your website. These links are useful to both your visitors as well as Search Engines.

For visitors, it will help them go deeper into the content or information you are providing. And, for Search Engines, internal links are useful to crawl, find and rank your pages.

If a page or post gets a lot of links, this is a signal to Google that it’s high-value content. Which will give you points in your rankings. Internal linking is an important factor that it’s usually underrated, or people don’t know much about, so make sure you add it to your content writing and improve your SEO in the long run.

Final thoughts

SEO is a large, multi-faceted, and hugely important part of digital marketing. As I mentioned earlier this is just a small part of the whole strategy to improve your SEO rankings.

If you haven’t yet, download our guide: “Website Optimisation, a Holistic Approach” where you can learn more about how to optimise your websites for humans and Search Engines.

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