Content Building

SEO content is, quite simply, content that’s designed to rank in search engines like Google. SEO have with technical optimization has the same goal – to make the website visible.

TOP SEO ranking factors

Headings

Headings are the titles, varying in size, at the beginning of pages, sections, and paragraphs. For SEO and content quality purposes, search engines “scan” a page’s headings to determine that:

• The keywords and related words are found in the page’s main headings
• The page’s sub-headings reflect the main headings
• The page’s content (paragraph text) reflects the sub-headings

If you’re writing a coffee-rubbed steak recipe, you’ll need to make sure you list ingredients under an “ingredients” heading, and so on. This will ensure that search engines understand what’s happening on the page, and may even score you a featured snippet.

Keywords based on SEO

Your keywords should be a word or phrase that you think people might be typing into search engines.

Make sure your keyword is evenly distributed throughout your content, and is also found in the headings and subheadings—but not all of them. Too many keywords will make search engines think your page is spam.

If you’re solely focused on “hacking” SEO content rather than readability, your strategy might simply be to plug your keyword as often as possible, along with variations and related phrases. That would be a mistake.

Instead, I personally prefer to account for readability and helpfulness and allow the organic shares and long pageviews to help boost my content’s ranking. These are both SEO indicators that search engines use to determine content quality as well.

Relevant topics

The topic of your content needs to be relevant to your readers, obviously. But it also needs to be relevant to the content on your website and on your other blogs.

If one day your local movie theater started publishing software reviews instead of showtimes, their organic traffic would drop to zero. Search engines take topic into account for SEO because sites that give information on topic X aren’t necessarily experts on topics Y or Z.

Pro tip: Once you’ve got your topic picked out, type it into Google as a question. Try to incorporate some of the “People also ask…” points into your copy. This will make it rank better.

High-quality content

There are no two ways about it, your content needs to be good — no matter what type of content it is. Content exists solely to help people, which in turn builds your following and fosters trust.

This means you should be publishing original, novel insights — things people haven’t heard before — on topics you’re passionate about. It’s not really possible (or advisable) to spoof your way onto the front page of search engines just by stuffing your page with SEO and keywords.

Alt tags in the content for SEO

Alt tags (or “alt text”) are invisible bits of data associated with images that tell search engines what’s going on in the picture. Image alt tags that match the topic and keywords let search engines know that even the photos on the page are relevant, thus boosting its SEO value.

Alt tags are also read aloud to visually impaired users via their web browsers, making them an important accessibility feature as well. Be sure to include alt tags on any photos you’re using in your SEO content.

External links

External links are links from your content to other domains. When linking out, you get SEO points for linking to domains with content similar to the topic you’re writing about.

The actual text you choose to transform into a hyperlink is known as the anchor text. You get bonus points if the anchor text contextually matches the content on the page you’re linking to. You get fewer points if your anchor text is random.

Internal links

Internal links work the same way external links work. Good anchor texts, relevant content, all that stuff makes your internal links more solid. The difference is that, with internal links, you’re linking to other pages on your own website rather than external pages.

This serves as a good method of giving your favorite web pages the highest link value and thus more visibility. If you have a good piece of SEO content that your users enjoy, link to it from your other posts!

Mobile-friendliness

Mobile traffic accounts for roughly 50% of all web traffic as of Q4 2019. To provide their users with the best possible experience, search engines are constantly testing pages’ mobile-friendliness and providing higher visibility to the pages that perform well.

As a general rule, make sure all of your content elements will span a mobile page easily, without creating the need for horizontal scrolling or mini-text.

Some visual web editors get confused about margin spaces, so make sure nothing on your published mobile page is overlapping or in the wrong place. If your pictures are huge, make sure they’ll resize on mobile. It’s all about fitting everything properly in that tiny vertical screen.

Remember that you can always test your mobile usability yourself and update your published SEO content as needed.