When you make a post, blog, or website, you want it to reach the widest possible audience. Your effort then ranks higher in search engines, which brings in more customers and, eventually, higher sales and profits. You can boost your online creation prowess with the following content optimization tips.
1. Understand your audience.
Great content is something that your audience gobbles up and shares without prompting. For those things to happen, you need to understand who you’re writing for. Answering the following questions can provide valuable information about your users.
- What are their basic details: age, gender, family status, living situation, occupation, education, and technical background?
- What problems do they have?
- How does what your business offers solve the problems of your audience?
- Where are most of your customers signing in from?
- What times and days are they most active online?
- What topics does your audience like?
- What topics do they hate?
- What websites, brands, and social media do they follow?
The answers to these questions may redefine your content strategy. For example, you may have been following the recommended blog strategy of writing multiple 300-word posts every week. But analyzing your audience reveals that your longer in-depth articles are being shared more often than the short posts. This can prompt you to switch to fewer articles per week that are 1,000 – 1,500 words long.
2. Write a lot.
New content keeps your audience coming back and ranks your posts higher on search engines. How often you should post depends on the goals you have for your site, according to HubSpot.
- If you want to organically increase the traffic to your pages, publish as much optimized content as you can. Small blogs can deliver new posts 3 to 4 times a week. Large blogs can publish and update posts 4 to 5 times a week.
- For brand awareness, create different content that provides helpful information. Small blogs can deliver once or twice a week. Large blogs should create or publish 3 to 4 times a week.
3. Be funny.
How many times have you come across a funny meme, post, or video in the course of a week? And after you’ve had a good laugh, what’s the first thing you do? Share what you’ve found to relatives, friends, and co-workers.
And whether the humor is relevant to your business is irrelevant. You share it because it’s funny. And if your audience is American, an Ipsos Open Thinking Exchange survey reveals that they tend to share funny content over important ones.
Bring humor into your content when you can. Your piece may end up going viral, bringing in new customers that increase your target base exponentially. If you can’t create your own funny posts, feel free to share humor made by others as long as it relates to your product or service.
4. Optimize the meta.
Meta tags are small pieces of text in page code that are generally not seen by users on your website. But the text may appear elsewhere outside your site. These tags tell search engines what the page is about and can affect your search rankings. The following are the most important tags that you should optimize.
- The Title tag appears as the title of your page in search results. Craft a particularly descriptive title because it affects your search rankings.
- The Description Attribute may appear in search results to reveal what your page is about. But search engines often pick text from the page itself that is already visible to the users. While the words used for this attribute don’t affect rankings, the text could persuade searchers to click the Title link and go to your page.
- Index/Noindex informs search engines whether your page should appear in the search results. You obviously want the Index tag.
- Follow/Nofollow tells search engines whether they should trust the links on your page and follow them to the pages they link to.
You may need to know some HTML if you want to directly code meta tags. But many web design tools have a form you can fill out to implement meta tags.
5. Optimize image tags.
The Internet thrives on images. Many users search for relevant pages using pictures as much as text. Images also have tags that you can optimize to make your page more appealing to search engines. The following are the most important ones:
- The Alt tag tells search engines what your image is about. Such engines cannot interpret images on their own. Instead, they rely on the text that you use in the tag, which can determine how your page is ranked.
- The Image tag pops up when a user moves the mouse over the image. It helps users understand what a picture is about, especially if it’s of an unusual product or service.
6. Organize with headings.
Most users only take a few seconds to scan a page and decide whether it is worth their time. You can help them make that decision by organizing your content with headings and subheadings.
- Use just one H1 tag as the title of the page.
- You can have multiple H2 tags as headings with each one having H3 tags as subheadings.
- You can also use H4 through H7 tags but those may be harder to distinguish from each other.
Make sure your heading reflects the content beneath it. For higher rankings, try to include a related keyword in all your headings. If your headings don’t match the content, your page will rank poorly in the results.
7. Build authority with links.
High-quality links increase your search rankings. Two types of link build authority for your web page.
- Internal links lead to related pages on your site. Internal links also prompt users to remain on your site as they jump from one page to the next.
- External links go to external resources that are related to your content, high authority, and are non-competitive.
For whichever link you’re using, be sure to use as anchor text a keyword that relates to your content.
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