By Roger Gallager
Is producing quality content enough?
When producing content, every business and brand knows quality is of importance.
Quality content commands an authority a mere content mill focusing on quantity won’t be able to emulate—it’s a sound content marketing strategy.
Quality over quantity is still the reigning theme in the world of content.
So you ventured out and created quality content, which took you days because you spent a lot of time with in-depth research to pull off.
You posted your content on your site and waited days for the numbers to show up.
But nothing.
The figures you projected for your content and the figures you’re looking at right now are worlds apart.
Surely, your high-grade content is not to blame, but there’s something missing to generate the numbers your content deserves.
What is it?
Quality is Nothing Without Attention
The answer is search engine optimization or SEO, the long-touted Internet marketing technique that helps in improving the visibility of your content.
Quality content doesn’t mean anything if no one can find it. And, without SEO, only your mom or your close friends will see it.
SEO helps in redirecting the attention of readers, so they can read, savor, and share the quality content you painstakingly created.
To get your content the figures it definitely deserves, we’ve listed the SEO knowledge you need to create content.
Anticipate Where Users Are Going
Or in other words, be relevant.
One of the best content writing tips is to remain within the sphere of your brand’s niche.
Produce quality content that’s highly relevant to your target user and you’ve cleared a huge a hurdle in making SEO work when crafting your content.
Relevance is necessary because the bread and butter of SEO is keywords; relevant keywords people use to search for things they want to look up and want to learn more about.
Knowing how SEO affects our content and staying within your niche makes it easy to assume the perspective of users so you can predict which keywords they will use before they can get to your content.
You can then incorporate the same keywords, consequently increasing both your readers and your page rank.
For quick results, you can use a keyword generator when crafting content for SEO.
SEO and Social Media is a Powerful Combination
Another important note about SEO is you must learn how closely it works with social media.
It’s highly important to have social media sharing buttons near your content for two reasons:
- Social media sites typically dominate the search rankings. Having your content shared and talked about makes content curation a lot easier, which will lead to your content getting more views; and
- Social media is a great content curation strategy that can boost the traffic volume and activity of your site.
This improves one’s search results ranking as search engines usually measure volume and activity as some of the factors in search engine rankings.
High site visibility means high content visibility, so don’t forget to feature that share button the next time you post killer content.
Get All The Links You Can
Here’s a sound content curation strategy guide: Ask for help from other content marketers.
This means you want other sites to link to your content, and it doesn’t hurt to ask. It’s a great way to naturally improve your content page and your site’s authority in the eyes of the search engines.
This SEO tactic is called link building.
If you’re so sure about the quality of your content, then getting it cited by relevant authoritative websites won’t be much of a problem.
Interact with these sites, catch their attention, get them to mention your site, or to include a hyperlink to your content in their piece.
Do everything you can to maximize this content curation guide.
If you’re serious about generating significant site traffic and engagement, get as many links form authoritative sites as you can.
Most of the time, all they want to see is you producing content of top quality.
They don’t want to embarrass themselves in front of their wide audience, so make it easier for them to accept your piece.
Last, but not least, use internal links to make your content interactive in-site, which is a huge factor when search engine sites determine your ranking.
Linking relevant in-site features and other articles is a good way to make your SEO in content work.
Architecture Matters a Lot
Who would have thought architecture of your site would matter in the world of content marketing?
It does apparently, as content looking to boost its visibility relies a lot on the fusion of SEO and its content architecture.
That means including your niche subject matter—the relevant keyword—in the URL, and mixing it in your content’s title.
You can also incorporate it into your content image’s description (alt text), and subtitle repetition throughout your content.
Not keeping a close eye on what SEO elements our content need will put you at a severe risk of being drowned out by content with better architecture.
The next architecture you should spend most of your time on is the very site that houses your content: Yours.
The basics of having links that redirect users to the homepage, the category page, and the subcategory page in your site is necessary to optimize in-site activity.
Producing content meta-information is necessary to make it easier for search engines to assess your site’s credentials and subject matter relevance to a specific keyword before they set you to an appropriate ranking.
Keep in mind that the overall architecture in terms of technological platforms apply in SEO, too.
One good example is the importance of a site’s loading speed. If it fails to meet the loading speed standards, it will incur a ranking penalty that would severely hurt its visibility and traffic.
That’s why it would be a good idea to choose optimized web technologies today such as HTML5 for your site architecture over archaic technologies such as flash.
Google recently unveiled its new algorithm that improves the ranking of mobile-friendly sites, underlining the importance of putting dynamic sites in consideration when you’re gunning for SEO in your content.
Next time you find yourself producing content that fails to rack up the numbers it’s supposed to have, it’s a good idea to pop the proverbial hood and check whether certain SEO elements are present and in working condition.
This way, you can tweak your content and your site in ways that would boost traffic, activity, visibility, and ultimately, its rankings.
Have fun doing SEO while you also write for humans!
images credits: startupstockphotos via Pexels, tookapic via Pexels
