How to Optimize Content Efforts for SEO
SEO is not a singular effort that your company can just “do”.
Instead, SEO is a process that describes various services and factors that improve your site’s chances to be displayed prominently in search engine results for certain keywords and terms.
Optimizing your content to rank for your target terms is among the core SEO services you can pursue. This applies both to your site content and content marketing efforts.
This article details how to optimize your content for SEO through on-site optimization and content marketing and how these efforts work to benefit your search rankings.
Use Keyword Optimization for All of Your Site’s Content
Keywords are the backbone of SEO. They are the most basic, underlying factor on which search engine results pages (SERPs) are built.
Given their importance to your search engine visibility, it is imperative that you consider how to optimize your content for your target terms, both for your on-site and off-site content efforts.
Your site content refers to everything that is included on the pages of your website: Product descriptions, your “About Us” page, client testimonials, etc.
Optimizing your site for keywords does not mean stuffing them as much as possible in your site content. It means strategically placing keywords where search engines will recognize and associate them with related search queries.
3 On-Site Optimization Techniques
Three example methods of on-site optimization methods for your site content are title tags, meta descriptions, and image alt text.
- Title tags: Include your target keywords in the title tags, or the HTML code that represents the title of your web pages, of relevant pages on your site. For example, if you are targeting the term “men’s reef sandals”, make sure to include that wording in the titles for relevant product pages.
- Meta descriptions: Meta descriptions provide insight to searchers about the content that they will encounter by clicking on your search listing. Include your target keywords terms in your descriptions to show that your content is relevant to the term.
- Image alt text: Include alt text with every image you use on your site. Image alt text describes the content of your images so Google can recognize and associate that with a given topic. Ideally, most of your images relate to one of your key terms, so including keywords that includes your keywords can have SEO benefit.
It should be said that each of these tactics require familiarity with the basic back-end structure of your website.
Make sure you consult with your site administrator or consider hiring an SEO company that you can consult to make sure you properly adjust these functions.
