Darren Franks - February 15, 2012
There are multitudes of ways to optimize your content for SEO purposes. You perform the necessary due diligence by thinking up a theme for each page on your site and then researching potential keyphrases that represents each theme. That’s only the first part, however. It is then the job of the web writer to apply what has been researched to the actual page; you may have the most optimal keyphrases possible, but they are useless unless the content is constructed in a manner that will engage the reader and the search engines. The search algorithms are so advanced nowadays that they are able to determine the quality of the textual content that is applied to the pages of your website. Listed below are several ways to make your site’s content “pop” for the site visitor and potentially enhance their performance in search:
- Use numbered or bulleted lists (as we’ve done here) where applicable to “break” the content up: Search engines place a great deal of relevancy on important keywords used in a list, plus the average user is likely to be more engaged and keep reading (and possibly link to) the content on the page.
- Use a detailed diagram or chart to explain or relay the information in a more succinct way: This is also useful in garnering more interest and inbound links to the page.
- Utilize quality images, where appropriate: An interesting, high quality image on your webpage can make the content more aesthetically pleasing and, if utilizing optimal alt tag text, may give the page a fair chance of it appearing in Google’s image or “blended” search results.
- Anchor Text: Linking within the page’s content with keyword rich anchor text (the clickable, linked text) to another important page on your site will direct your visitors to yet more of your site’s well written content, as well as enabling the search spiders to crawl and give more ‘weight” to the website’s optimized copy.
- An engaging headline using the main keyword for the page: When using important keywords in your page’s headline, coded with the <h1> tag, you are signaling to the search spiders that this is the main theme of the page, and that the keyword (s) contained within it should be given the most authority, thus possibly improving the pages’ search performance for that keyword.
