Your Website SEO Checkup: Part 4 of 8 – Content Optimization

Content is the heart and soul of any good SEO strategy. Creating unique and compelling content is probably one of the hardest parts of anyone’s SEO efforts. Search Engines love a website/blog that is updated frequently with lots of new, fresh content. The more frequently your content is being updated, the more search engines will “crawl” your site. As search engines continuously evolve, they are giving more and more weight to websites that have unique content that is updated regularly.

Types of Content

Content on a website can be defined simply as anything a user can consume on a website. Website content comes in multiple formats. Text, Images, Video, Audio, Whitepapers, Demos, Applications, and PDF’s all make up website content.

Everybody online consumes information differently. That’s why it is a good idea to use multiple formats when adding web content to your site. For some people, reading a long 3-5 page article will be preferable. However some people would rather watch a video or download a podcast and listen to it later. It is a good idea to do some research on your target market and see how they prefer to consume information.

Optimizing Your Content

When writing website copy you want to make sure that you are optimizing it for the keywords/phrases you are trying to rank for. If possible, use keywords in your title, description, main text, links and tags. However, do not try to cram keywords in your text just for the sake of search engines.

Write for humans, not search engines.

Be creative when writing your content. If you are optimizing your content for “discount computer software” your content may want to be something like this.

Example ABC offers discounts on top selling computer software. Choose from hundreds of software programs like Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Office, Norton Antivirus, and more… Purchase one of our discounted products today and start enhancing your computer system and productivity.

It may not be the most compelling copy, but noticed how I used the words “discount computer software” throughout those three sentences. I used “discount”, “computer” and “software” in two different spots, while still making it easy for a user to read. You can mix up your copy by adding the singular or plural.

Keyword Density

Keyword Density is the number of times any given keyword appears in your content/post.

So, what is too much? What is too little?

There really is no definite answer, however a good keyword density percentage would be anywhere from 3%-6%. Again, do not try and stuff keywords in to a sentence just too please search engines. Ultimately, a human will be reading your content and if it doesn’t make sense to the reader, it will have a negative impact on your site.

Anchor Text

Anchor Text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. Search engines give more weight to the words that are being used in a hyperlink. Going back to the discount computer software example, Instead of having the link say Click Here
to see our titles, have it say Discount Computer Software Titles.

By using your keywords in the link it places more emphasis on those keywords.

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