As I’ve talked about in the previous parts of this course the popular saying is “Content is King”. The content on your site is the entire purpose anybody would want to visit your website. If you have nothing good to offer, then there is really no reason for anyone to visit your site. This is why that saying is so popular. Content is where it all starts. Providing good content is the heart and soul of your website and for SEO.
Create Content For Real People
The first and only real golden rule of creating content for your site is that your content should be made for real people. I know you’re saying “well of course! I know that” but you’d be surprised as to how easily this escapes people, especially in the SEO world. All the things we usually discuss in regard to optimizing for SEO are mainly looking at it from Google’s crawlers and algorithms perspective so it’s easy to get stuck in that mindset.
When I say create content for real people that means don’t get hung up on “how many times should I use my keyword phrase” or “how many words should my content be”. Not that these things don’t matter at all, but they only matter if it makes sense for real people.
For example, if you have a page about “how to properly train your dog” and you are targeting the keyword “dog training” it would make sense to use the keyword phrase “dog training” fairly often in your article. You would also want to cover the topic in-depth which would lead to a fairly long article. A short article that doesn’t reference dog training at all would probably not be seen as providing high-quality content on dog training.
On the other hand, if you had a site that was selling dog chew toys and you were targeting the keyword “walking dog toy” it might be odd to fit that exact keyword phrase “walking dog toy” into your content naturally and the searcher is probably looking for either a quick description or a page to buy these type of dog toys. They are most likely not looking for some long-winded 2000 word article about it.
Each topic and niche are different and what defines high-quality content will be different for those niches, topics, keywords, etc… Google has become incredibly good at understanding what high-quality content is within different niches partially thanks to Google RankBrain that was added to the algorithm a few years back. Basically, RankBrain is machine learning and continues getting better at knowing which signals define a high-quality page for certain niches and keywords. This means that signals that might work for one niche may be very different for another.
Gets tricky right!? That’s why when it comes to creating your actual content. Think about real readers and users first! Stop obsessing over what some SEO plugin tells you about how many times your keyword should be placed in the article or some advice a “guru” gave you that all your articles need to be 2000 words. Use common sense and look at what content is already ranking for your keyword to see what might be needed.
Topics People Are Searching For
Now, this is something we discussed in our keyword research portion of the tutorial but I just wanted to touch on it now as it is very important.
Far too many times I see people complaining that they are getting no traffic. They have written tons of articles, many of which are ranking, but they never bothered to find out if the keywords, topics, and niche they are writing about have any search volume.
Not to say every single article you write needs to be on a topic that has loads of search volume, but if you are constantly not accounting for this you may be wasting a lot of time, money, and hard work on content that nobody cares to ever view. That is why keyword research is so important!
Getting That Extra SEO Edge
LSI Keywords
So now that we are focused on creating high-quality content that our readers and users will love we can sprinkle a little SEO magic on it to help things along a bit. One of the best ways to do this is to incorporate some LSI keywords (latent semantic indexing).
LSI keywords are related words and phrases to your topic that Google might expect to see in this niche/topic. You can check out our article about LSI keywords here to learn more if you are unfamiliar. When using Keysearch you can use our Content Assistant feature to find some good LSI keywords in your niche. How it works is we grab the top Google results for the keyword specified, analyze the top-ranking pages and see what words and phrases they most have in common. Basically, reverse engineering some of the algorithm to see what type of words or phrases Google is associating with that keyword. Pretty cool right?
The same rules apply to LSI words as they did to your regular keywords. Don’t force anything! If the LSI phrases don’t make sense or don’t benefit your content then leave it alone. Many times though, you’ll notice these LSI words and phrases not only fit in nicely but help you better round out your content. For example, if you were writing an article on “dog training” it’s possible that one of the LSI phrases might be “clicker training”. Now that might not have been part of your content but adding a few paragraphs on that would definitely make for a better article!
Internal Linking
Another great way to gain a little extra SEO edge is through internal linking. Wikipedia has made a career off of using internal linking to fully utilize the authority and strength of its website. If you go to Wikipedia you’ll notice that everything that is referenced somewhere else on Wikipedia will be linked within the article. Not only that!… It will be linked with descriptive anchor text to better help Google know what that linked page is about.
When going through your content make sure you link to your other pages when keywords or phrases that relate to them come up. This will help you flow your link juice nicely, and also help Google identify what your pages are about and what keywords and phrases you feel represent them.
Adding Elements Users Will Share
There are some types of content that users will be more eager to share and in turn, might provide your site with more links. Things like:
- Videos
- Infographics
- Funny images
- Top (5 or 10) lists
To name a few… If you are in a niche where you can add these things then you may want to do so. Adding a video to a dog training article or an infographic to an article about stocks may not only make your user’s experience better but may also be something these readers want to share.
Not every niche will lend itself to shared content, but those that do can benefit greatly from incorporating these elements.
Don’t Skimp on Content
Your content is going to be the driving force behind your rankings. As I’ve said in past tutorials, if you don’t have good content you will constantly be struggling to rank no matter what type of backlinks you have. When it comes to building a quality site the last thing to skimp on is your content.
- Make sure your articles are well written. If you are writing in English but don’t speak the language well, maybe hire someone who does to edit or write your articles.
- If you are writing on a subject where you aren’t very knowledgeable, then do some research or hire someone who is an expert to write the article.
- Give your articles a unique perspective. No matter what niche or topic you write about, somebody else has probably already written something on it. Think of what makes your perspective unique and what gives your content its own “voice”.
- Look at the other available content in your niche and think “How can I make my article better than all of these other articles”.
- Don’t copy or quickly re-write someone else’s articles. This never works and can lead to your page being penalized.
- Don’t be afraid to add to or completely change old articles if you can make them better.
- Does your content tell the full story and completely cover the topic in full? If not keep going until it does.
- Don’t just use AI content. AI content has become very popular these days. It can be a part of your content process, but it shouldn’t be your entire process.
What We Learned
In part 5 of our tutorial, you should now have a good understanding of what you should be focused on when creating your site’s content. Let’s recap some of the main points of this tutorial.
- Content is the entire reason anybody would ever want to visit your page
- Create content for humans first
- Quality content is different for each niche and topic. There is no template for good content
- Make sure your topics are something people actually care to search for
- Try and incorporate some LSI keywords
- Make sure to maximize your internal linking
- If possible, add elements users/readers want to share
- Don’t skimp on your content. Do what you can to make it the best out there!
Continue on to Part 6 of our course: Link Building Overview
- How to Do Keyword Research for Free: Best Free Keyword Research Tools in 2024 - December 13, 2024
- Benefits of Keyword Clustering: Why is it Important to Group Relevant Keywords Together? - December 13, 2024
- What is Keyword Density in SEO and Its Importance - December 13, 2024
