09 Nov Keyword is not the Key

An important aspect in today’s world of digital marketing is making the most of you online presence by creating useful, informative content for your site. This can be in the form of a blog, detailed information about your services, or just in your page content. All of these things need to be concise, helpful, and easy to navigate.
But there is another quality content needs to have if you want to get the traffic you need to meet your goals: it needs to be findable. “Findable content” may seem like a foregone conclusion in a world where private photos can be leaked online for the world to see. If it is on the internet, anyone can see it. Right?
Technically, the answer is yes. However, the way that you market the information on your site, and more importantly, the way it is written, has a huge impact on whether or not your content can be easily found by the people you want to see it.
The step of this process that gets the most attention in blogs and marketing circles is the keyword and marketing process. Namely, search engine optimization. Keywords are specific terms used to increase your rank in search results when someone is looking for the type of service you provide.
The more these specific phrases (which can be determined with google or even Facebook) are repeated in your content, the higher your rank. It seems simple, then, to get your information to the eyes of your target audience. And it is, to an extent.
The other step, however, and the one that everyone seems to gloss over, is creating the best content available for your audience to see. So often, search results are crammed with nonsensical strings of keywords that don’t provide any useful information, or the information is so difficult to decipher that it isn’t worth the reader’s time.
This approach will hurt you far more than a lower search ranking. Regularly updating your site with quality content (not just blobs of words that human beings can’t understand) is just as, if not more important than creating keyword-rich content. Use metadata to highlight your keyword use, so search engines can find your well-written, properly structured content and bring it to your audience.
Optimizing your site for mobile users and analyzing how people are getting to your site will help you decide what is working, what is not, and how to reach more people. However, the content they find when they get there is key.
So, remember this article when you are writing your blog or creating your website, and don’t miss the forest for the trees. Repeating your awesome, optimized keywords will only get you so far. You have to have the information to make them count for something more than a superficial rank.