SEO Part 3: How to optimize website content
Welcome to the second part of my SEO how to guide. Here are 8 quick tips to optimize the content of your website that will boost its search ranking score.
1. Don’t Overuse Keywords
In the early days of SEO, web developers would repeat key words to improve their SEO, however, Search Engines have since become a lot more intelligent and penalise such tactics.
Search Engines now use a retrieval method called Latent Semantic Indexing. This means that crawlers understand the topic of a page by recognising general terms throughout the webpage in context of each other. To improve your SEO the body of your website should read well and include relevant themes and natural variants of your keywords as shown below:
2. Important Information near the Beginning
It is advised to have important information near the beginning of a website as it will be the first information that crawlers come across when assessing a website.
3. Original Content
Search Engines do not appreciate duplicate webpages because they struggle to decide the best result between the two. Rather than gathering both results, a search engine will choose one, however because the crawlers are confused and lack confidence in the result the SEO score will suffer. To avoid this problem you must make sure that your content is original.
In some cases, pages can be reached by a number of different paths for example on Amazon, you could reach a results page by typing a search query or you could reach the same page by defining different search specifications. These URLs all lead to the same landing page, and are technically duplicates:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FO9ZRZ0/
http://amazon.com/BalanceFrom-All-Purpose-Anti-Tear-Exercise-Carrying/dp/B00FO9ZRZ0/
http://www.amazon.com/yoga-mat/dp/B00FO9ZRZ0/
The SEO of these pages would therefore suffer. To avoid this problem Canonical Tags were introduced that indicate one preferred URL from a selection of different URLS that lead to the same page.
Simply add a Canonical Tag to your preferred URL like so:
4. Content Length
It has not been confirmed but there is a general agreement that the more words a website has the better its SEO score will be as research suggests:
The thinking is that a website should offer more information and cover more topics if it has more content. However, I would argue that quality is more important than quality. I wouldn’t want to encourage people to fill their site with nonsense just to add to the word count. If you content is rich with helpful information it will be popular and your SEO score will naturally improve.
5. Use Hyperlinks
- Anchor Text: is text with an added hyperlink. Crawlers will identify anchor text more so than generic text when deciding what your page is about. Include anchor text that is relevant to your website e.g. SEO
Anchor text can link to other pages of your website which will tell a crawler what that page is about e.g. optimize HTML
Keep in mind, too many anchor texts can be excessive and will make a webpage appear to be spam.
- Outbound Links: are links to other websites from your website. Including outbound links to quality websites will make your webpage appear informative and valuable.
- Inbound Links: are links to your website from other websites. (This is more off-page SEO but is still a great technique) Crawlers will consider your website to be important if other sites feature inbound links, particularly if the link is found on a ‘quality’/popular website that has a high search engine ranking.
Note: It is a great idea to include a link to your website in a press release that would then be published on other quality sites and improve your SEO.
6. Content Updates
Search engines take into account how active a website and assume that a dormant website would be less valuable than a website that is constantly being updated. Regularly adding new content will improve your Website’s SEO and will also gratify your visitors.
Quick Tip: A great way to keep your website updated is to include a social media feed such as a Twitter Feed which will keep you website active as you post on Twitter.
7. Social Media Buttons
Social media buttons can be added to your webpage so that users can easily share your content via social media which will increase your number of inbound links. =
Here’s a list of Social Media Buttons that you can add to your site
8. Use SEO Friendly URLs
Make sure your webpages have a clear URL that explains what the page is about and naturally mentions key words that can be recognised crawlers.
For example, this default URL for this blog entry was:
- https://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/sm567/2015/05/06/40/
So I changed it to:
Simply click ‘Edit’ at the top of your WordPress post, and write your preferred URL (see below)
And again…once you’ve optimized your URL use WooRank to review your SEO score and get more advice on how to improve your Page!
References
Espiritu, K. (2012). How Important is Content Length? Why Data-Driven SEO Trumps Guru Opinions – The serpIQ Blog. [online] The serpIQ Blog. Available at: http://blog.serpiq.com/how-important-is-content-length-why-data-driven-seo-trumps-guru-opinions/ [Accessed 13 May 2015].
Evans, M. (2012). 7 HTML Guidelines For Website Usability & SEO – Usability Geek. [online] Usability Geek. Available at: http://usabilitygeek.com/7-html-guidelines-for-website-usability-seo/ [Accessed 13 May 2015].
Moz, (2014). More than Keywords: 7 Concepts of Advanced On-Page SEO. [online] Available at: https://moz.com/blog/7-advanced-seo-concepts [Accessed 13 May 2015].
Volume 9, I. (2015). How to Use Anchor Text to Improve SEO | Volume Nine. [online] Volume Nine SEO. Available at: http://www.v9seo.com/blog/2015/01/28/how-to-use-anchor-text-seo/ [Accessed 13 May 2015].