Bloggers andonline marketers juggle various things at the same time. If you have beenworking in the blogosphere for a while, you must have seen some blogs that rankon top in Google.
Have you everthought about why they always rank on the first page of Google?
The answer mightbe YES.
Turns out, you dothink about those blogs.
My question was acurveball; they don’t “always” rank on the first page of Google.
There would beuntapped search terms that even those influential blogs aren’t aware of yet.
Before we dig deeper, you must understand what successful bloggers do. They produce SEO content, manage affiliate marketing, run Facebook ads, research on new topics, do on-page and off-page SEO, and engage people on social media.
Truth be told, the list of responsibilities of a blogger never ends. And, this is why they stand out and make money.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of those website growth tactics that every website owner and blogger seems to pursue at some point.
However, it doesn’t mean everyone can pull this off because it’s not that simple. Ranking a website or an article does require a set of skills, but the good news is that we’ve got this covered for you.
I’ll discuss a lot of things that will help you understand SEO content as well as how to do on-page SEO.
So relax. Graba cup of coffee. Sit on your couch. Turn off your Netflix for 15 minutes.
Let me start withsome basics.
What’s SEO Content?
SEO content is akeyword-driven content that blogs and websites publish to get traction from thesearch engines in the form of website visitors. One can tell the differencebetween the SEO content and other content right off the bat. Several indicatorsdetermine the SEO content, for instance:
- Target Audience
- Keywords Selection
- Internal Linking
- Outbound Linking
- Images Utilization
- Titles and Subheadings
So it’s virtually impossible to rank on the first page of Google without producing SEO content. Top bloggers and SEO experts put in the work in finding and capitalizing the keywords.
The SEO content isn’t vital to blogs and websites only, but instead, it’s also the key to the landing pages and niche sites’ success.
If you haven’t had a chance to work on a niche site, you should look into this as well. If you ever plan to launch a niche site, SEO content would be the game-changer for you.
Why is SEO Content Important?
When a website is built, there are different elements which are taken care of such as layout design, responsiveness, copy, keywords, call-to-actions, and other stuff. Once the website goes live, the next phase is the growth.
That’s where SEO content comes into play because it is crucial to getting engagement, visitors, leads, and sales on a website.
One of the fundamentals of website optimization is SEO Content. When SEO experts analyze the websites, they go through various sections during their website surgery. They look at the keywords density, inbound links, outbound links, internal linking, targeted keywords, content length, and meta tags.
The SEO content, however, is something that can’t be neglected.
Here are a few things the SEO Content would do:
- The SEO content is the stepping stone to reaching outto the target audience
- It helps search engines distinguish websites todetermine the type
- It provides a chance for blogs and websites todominate search engine results
- The keyword insertion would not have been possible ifit wasn’t for the SEO content
- The SEO content allows websites and blogs to convertvisitors into customers
So, understandably, the SEO content is the testament of website growth whether you’re running a blog or a company website. Search engines are supposed to determine the relevancy of the websites in search engines results based on multiple factors.
Therefore, SEO content becomes a helping hand to the search engines in providing the quality content their users are looking for.
Thus, search engines value relevant and optimized content that delivers answers and solutions to the searchers.
On the otherhand, it’s necessary to understand what people are looking for and what searchterms they are using to find information, data, or products. Keyword Researchis the strategy that is used to figure out the search terms that people areusing to find out the solutions.
Contentmarketers, bloggers, and SEOs lookout for high-performance keywords to targetand make money from various methods.
What is Keyword Research?
Keyword researchis a process of digging and finding the untapped keywords to target throughcontent creation. It is an essential part of the content marketing plan. Thecore purpose of keyword research is to create content around the keywords thathave some attention.
Keyword research is mostly done through keywords software that provides insights into the searched keywords.
Long Tail Prois a paid online tool for finding the best keywords to target. A lot ofbloggers and affiliate marketer prefer this tool for hunting down the bestkeywords to use in their content.
UberSuggestis a free tool from Neil Patel. It does what any paid keyword tool would do foryou. It helps you analyze and find suitable keywords to target.
Keywordtool.iois a paid keyword research tool that assists people in finding keywords withlow competition and high demand.
Here are four keyelements of keyword research:
1. Search Volume
The search volumeshows the total number of searches with a specific keyword in a month. Akeyword with 500+ searches could be targeted. However, there is no standardrule for this; some bloggers prefer keywords with over 2,000 searches andothers go after the ones with 300+ searches a month.
2. Competition Level
The competitionlevel is the SEO difficulty of a keyword. If the SEO difficulty is high, itmeans the competition is fierce in that area. So bloggers and SEO experts lookout for low-competition keywords to dominate that space and rank their articlesfor better conversion.
3. Cost Per Click (CPC)
One of thereasons why keyword research is important because it tells you the cost perclick (CPC) of the keywords, which plays a vital role in the digital marketingfield. Most keyword research tools tell you the CPC of the keywords you’reanalyzing. The reason being it’s important for the bloggers and SEOs to knowthe value of the keywords in Google.
4. Trend
The trend sectiontells the demand for the keyword in the last 12 months or so. If a keyword’strend is on the rise or looks stable, it means the keyword is hot, which is apositive sign. Perhaps, one shouldn’t be targeting the keywords with adeclining trend.
Types of SEO: On-Page and Off-Page
Search engineoptimization (SEO) refers to the process of fine-tuning a website to providesearch engines and users with smooth and easy access to the content or product.In simple words, you want to rank for a keyword and get traffic to yourwebsite, you got to optimize your website or blog for search engines to makethat happen.
If you’re a newbie blogger, you might be fascinated by SEO because you may have seen some blogs ranking on the first page in Google. So you want to make that happen for yourself as well. The surefire way to achieve SEO growth and success is by practising it. The more you experiment with SEO, the higher the chances of success.
It’s a wide fieldwhich is difficult to encapsulate in a few lines. The SEO experts utilizedozens of strategies that mostly fall in two main categories of SEO.
1. On-Page SEO
The name speaksfor itself, though. The on-page SEO refers to the search engine optimizationtechniques that we apply on the website pages. There are lots of things thatSEO experts perform on the website pages to ensure that search engines read allthose signals and consider showcasing the site in the search engine resultpages, also known as SERP.
Here are a few essentials of the On-Page SEO in 2019:
1. Keywords
The chosenkeywords come into play when we do on-page SEO. Keywords are selected based onthe intent of the prospective audience and the solution we could providethrough our website or content.
The keywordsshould be included in the various sections of the website. The core part is theselection of the keywords. Once you choose the right keywords that trulyrepresent your business or purpose, you get closer to success.
The ultimate goalof the keywords selection is the organic traffic from the search engines sochoose the keywords wisely.
2. Meta Tags
Meta tags areessential website codes that carry the information about a website page or animage on the world wide web. From the SEO standpoint, it’s vital to have propermeta tags written in your website pages. You’ll read more why meta tags areextremely important, later on.
Meta tags are webpage components that help search engines understand what the certain page orimage is all about through the given information in the tags. There are titles,keywords, and description that are considered meta tags.
3. Website Copy
The website copy is the text written on the website pages or in the articles. The reason why website copy is important is that it carries the keywords which are key to the SEO growth.
If keywords aren’t included in the copy, it doesn’t carry the same weight as it could have been along with the keywords. However, avoid keywords stuffing into the copy because it doesn’t work that way.
4. Images Optimization
Imagesoptimization is a process of ensuring that the images which are being used onthe website are getting along perfectly. The primary concern about the imageswhen being included in the article is their size. A lot of bloggers use aplugin called Smush.itWordPress tool for compressing the images.
There is anotherWordPress plugin called EWWWImage Optimizer to optimize their images for the blog posts.
5. Page loading Speed
One of theimportant elements of ranking a website or a page in search engines is the pageloading speed. The better the page loading speed, the higher the websiteranking in search engines. Sure, there are dozens of factors that help searchengines determine what website page ranks where in the SERP. Learn more abouthow Google search algorithms work by clicking here.
2. Off-Page SEO
In off-page SEO,the techniques are applied off the website pages, meaning, the strategieshappen outside of the website platform, which is why it’s called off-page SEO.
SEO has a widespectrum, and to succeed in search engine optimization, you need to find abalance between the on-page and off-page SEO techniques. You may be able topull off good ranking by focusing in on just one type of SEO, but a handsomebalance between both these strategies would give extravagant results.
If it’s wasn’tfor the vitality of the off-page SEO, most SEO experts would only discuss theon-page SEO. Notice that you’d always read content on both on-page and off-pageSEO.
Here are four ways to do off-page SEO:
1. Link Building
Linking buildingis a process of creating backlinks on others’ websites through differentstrategies such as getting mentions, blog commenting, and buildingrelationships with bloggers. Most blogs and websites don’t have do-follow linkpolicies towards any outbound link, while some have a different approach.
Linking buildingis a slow process and it requires a lot of struggle and patience. Make surethat you’re trying to get backlinks from the most relevant and high-rankedblogs and sites.
2. Guest Posting
Guest posting hasbeen considered dead for a while now, but it still works somewhere along thelines. The problem with guest posting is that bloggers and SEO experts startedguest posting just for SEO, which pretty much turned a good off-page SEOstrategy into a money-machine.
Now, a lot ofsites and blogs are afraid of being penalized by Google so they don’t focusmuch on guest posting or don’t provide do-follow links. However, some bloggersaccept guest posts and provide do-follow links, but they try to keep thestandard of the content higher than the average blogs.
3. Outreach Campaign
An outreachcampaign refers to the strategy which involves reaching out to the bloggers andproviding them with resources to use in their content and mention the source.
If you’re ablogger, you might have received an email saying that they found a blog post ofyours, which is similar to their content. They request to link out to theirresource not just to increase the authenticity of blogger’s content, but alsoto give a backlink to a credible resource.
Here are three common outreach campaign tools:
- Infographics: They provide beautifully designed, usefulinfographics to publish and link back to them.
- Articles: They often send you their well-written, long articlesto check out and link out to the source.
- Ebooks: They provide ebooks for free and request to mentionthe website URL in the content.
- In-depth Content
One of thesecrets of winning over bloggers to link out to your site or source is writingin-depth content. When you publish valuable and long-form content in yourniche, chances are, you’d be helping out dozens of people. Some of them wouldbe so happy that they’d graciously mention your blog somewhere in theircontent.
Once that startsto happen, you could dominate search results for certain topics. Moreover,you’d open a window for your blog or company to get backlinks in the form ofmentions in the content.
So creatingin-depth and valuable content is a win-win situation.
Types of Keywords
When you pursueSEO, there are a lot of things that you get to learn along the way. You mighthave heard about the long-tail keywords before, but there are a few more typesof keywords you should know before moving further.
Here are four types of keywords you should know:
Short-tail Keywords
Short-tailkeywords are one-word keywords that are commonly used words such as “books” or“dogs” and they are extremely difficult to target because of their genericnature. Usually, the top sites ranking for such short-tail keywords.
Short-tail keywords are quite the opposite of the long-tail keywords which contains three or more words. For example, “DSLR” is a short-tail keyword and “cheap DSLR cameras on Amazon” is the long-tail keyword. DSLR
You might wonderwhy we should bother understanding short-tail keywords when long-term keywordsgive us a better chance to rank in search engines. The answer is thatshort-tail keywords help us in developing another type of keywords, whichyou’ll read next.
Mid-tail Keywords
Mid-tail keywordsare the keywords that develop a balance between the two major types of keywordssuch as short-tail and long-tail keywords. They are often used to create abalance between the two extremes. Their moderate nature brings in thecombination of different types of keywords in the content.
For example, if “DSLR” is a short-term keyword and “cheap DSLR cameras on Amazon” is the long-tail keyword, then “cheap DSLR camera” is the mid-tail keyword.
Not only do theyhelp in writing content, but they could also be useful in clarifying thepicture. They are, of course, worth understanding and utilizing, wherenecessary.
Long-tail Keywords
The long-tailkeywords are long-form search terms that people use when they know what exactlythey’re looking for so they try to extend the search phrase for better results.The thing about long-tail keywords is that they have less competition, highclickability ratio, and better conversion.
The intent,however, is something you need to figure out, meaning, if you clear what yourtarget audience is thinking and you have the answer to their query, you can winusing the long-tail keywords.
Here are a few examples of long-tail keywords:
- DSLR camera for beginners
- Digital single-lens reflex camera
- Canon cameras best buy
- Canon EOS rebel t6
You can see allof these keywords have four words. The thing about the long-tail keywords isthat they could be longer than four words as well. All you need to make surethat you have a legit tool that tells you that this keyword does exist,meaning, people are using it for searches.
LSI Keywords
Latent SemanticIndexing (LSI) keywords are the search phrases that are similar to the mainkeywords. The words “semantic” means related to meaning. The idea behindthe LSI keywords is that they help your site rank well because of therelativity of the keywords with the context of your copy. The higher therelativity, the bigger the opportunity. Therefore, LSI keywords are essentialto the SEO of a site.
For example, if your keyword is “DSLR camera for beginners” then LSI keywords would be “buy DSLR camera for beginners in 2019” and “cheap DSLR camera for beginners.”
How to do On-Page SEO
Let’s dive intothe key elements of on-page SEO so that you could do it the right way:
1. Use the Keyword in the Meta Tags
The first andforemost step is the keyword placement in the meta tags, which means that thekeyword must appear in the page title, description, and keyword tags. If you’rerunning a static PHP or HTML site, head over to this meta tag generator and createyour meta tags for free.
If you’re usingWordPress CMS, you can easily manage meta tags for each page and post usingyour SEO plugin like YoastSEO.
Most WordPressusers and bloggers prefer Yoast SEO, but there is an alternative to Yoast SEOcalled All-in-one-SEOPack. Fee free to try out this plugin and make sure that you aren’t leavingmeta tags empty for any post or page in WordPress.
2. Use the Keyword in a Subheading
A subheading isvital in SEO content because it’s written in bold and bigger text than a normalcopy. Not only visitors instantly look at the subheadings, but search enginesalso read the H2 text, especially when it’s bold. The H2 refers to the heading2 (text size) in the word editors.
The keywordmentioning in, at least, one subheading is a common practice among the SEOexperts. They believe that this practice carries weight, especially when itcomes to signaling search engines about the important text element.
3. Use the Keyword in the first and last 100 words
It’s extremelyimportant to use the keyword in the first 100 words of the article or websitecopy. The reason is that the first few words from the website copy show up inthe search engines as snippets. Understandably, search engines bots read thefirst few lines of the website copy or article to understand the content. So itturns out to be a huge ranking factor in the search engines.
A lot of expertsalso believe that it’s necessary to use the keyword in the closing paragraph aswell to ensure that you dominate over competition. However, it’s also importantto establish that keyword stuffing for the sake of ranking is a no-go.
4. Insert the Keyword in the Image meta tags
Some bloggers payclose attention to the keyword density and bolding the keywords in the copy,but they underestimate the strength of image meta tags. Images SEO is anessential part of the overall SEO strategy. There are four essential things inimage meta tags, which are the title, caption, alt text, and description.
These tags helpsearch engines identify the images. As a result, the blog or website ends upgetting organic traffic through images.
5. Add LSI Keywords to your Copy
I’ve explainedwhat LSI keywords are and what they do right at the beginning of this article.LSI keywords are significant in on-page SEO because they hint search enginesabout the relevancy of your content with the keywords.
Adding LSIkeywords not only helps in improving your SEO, but it also helps you in leadgeneration. The reason is that it all comes to the relevancy of the keywordswith the cause. To put simply, LSI keywords strengthen your narrative on acertain subject because search engines could read the relevant information onthe very page of your website.
6. Do Internal Linking
Internal linkingis a process of linking a page to another page of the same domain. The purposeof internal linking is to provide users a chance to go through other relevantresources from the same website to clarify the context of the copy.
Moreover, intechnical SEO language, we engage visitors and stop from leaving the site. Allan internal link does is that it drives the visitor to another page of thesite. As a result, the visitor spends more time on our website.
Search enginesconsider internal linking as a signal of credibility because when a site hasinternal resources to link to, it shows authenticity and effectiveness of thecontent. So internal linking could turn out to be a game-changer in youron-page SEO.
7. Optimize Images for SEO
Image SEO has asignificant role in on-page SEO in 2019. One of the reasons is that GoogleImages is a huge source of organic traffic for blogs and websites. All of thattraffic comes to the images of the sites. There are a couple of things that oneshould consider while optimizing images for SEO.
- Rename your images according to the topic or title of the blog post. It’s essential to remove any space in the image name, for example, name the image like this: content-seo.jpg. [Pay close attention to this point]
- Name your images as target keywords and LSI keywords to increase the relevancy of the content with the keywords.
Furthermore, theteam at Yoast wrote about the image SEOto help explain why it’s vital to do so and how to do it. Plus, you’llunderstand why images are important for on-page SEO.
Utilize the imagecompression tools such as reSmush.itfor compressing the images automatically in your WordPress site.
Moreover, you canmanually optimize the images using the tool called Compressor.io. The purpose of sharing a toolis to emphasize that this particular thing is necessary for the cause.
My Final Words
If you’re tryingto do on-page SEO in 2019, besides consuming loads of content from differentSEO and content marketing experts, experiment with strategies.
The more you testout techniques not just from others, but also what you believe might do well.The outcome of testing is always a lesson or an exceptional success.
I’ve been testing SEO techniques for a long time now. I’ve used many keywords tools and software. And, I can say this with confidence that you learn a new thing if you scratch your itch.
Sure, there aresurefire ways to rank articles and get traffic, but it doesn’t mean your everyarticle would rank on the first page of Google.
SEO content,on-page SEO, and backlink might earn you good ranking in the long run, but theSEO success lies in putting in the work, a lot of work.
I implore you todon’t let a few failures stop you from achieving what you want to achieve foryour blog SEO.
What’s your biggest problem in creating SEO content?
PS: If you are looking for the SEO Content Writing Service, make sure you check our website.
