01 Feb Your Website Content is Still King for SEO

SEO – search engine optimization – has been around for over 30 years. It has gradually evolved in that time, to match the requirements of search engines and in particular, Google. Well, let’s face it, Google is the search engine and SEO experts spend most of their time modifying their SEO strategies to conform to Google’s requirements. Every other search engine pretty much follows in Google’s wake.

That’s not necessarily a good thing. Google strives to give its users what it thinks is a quality user experience, which is in some ways a dumbing down of the search experience. I could talk a LOT about that, but that’s not the purpose of this particular post! Just bear in mind that Google is always making changes – and some in the works are sweeping – to its search interface and SEO experts must always keep abreast of those upcoming changes.

One thing that will never change with Search is that “content is king.” 

Content is King

Not only is content “king” as far as search engines are concerned, but also as far as your potential customers are concerned. 

There’s no point in driving someone to your website by being ranked high in the search engines for a certain keyword, if when the user arrives at your site, they take one look, realize that your site doesn’t offer what they expected it to offer, and “bounce.”

Here are a few tips for maximizing your SEO results for 2019.

1. Utilize “long-tail” keywords

A percentage of searchers no longer type what they are looking for into a search box and hit return. Instead, they use an Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistant – like Siri, for example – and ask very specific and long questions. 

The “keywords” they are likely to use in their queries are the keywords that should appear in your website content.

“Who’s the best cheap plumber on the South Side of Chicago?”

“Where is the best sushi in Greenville near the library?”

“How can I clean my gutters?”

There are keyword research providers such as Ahrefs.com that can help you – or your SEO provider – find the most popular searches, or you can select them based on your own knowledge of your industry.

2. Provide quality content

Your customers are looking for specific information to help them fulfill a need – whether it’s to find food they’ll like, or learn how to clean their gutters quickly and easily, or how to decide if an electric, gas or propane heater is right for them, for example.

Whatever your industry, it’s important to provide information that sets you up as an “authority” in your field, and someone that a visitor can trust. 

By providing well-written information, easily read, you will establish that authority.

Typically, the length of web pages should be “just long enough to reach the ground,” as Mark Twain would have put it if he knew anything about search engines. 500-word web pages are about average, as they provide enough text to be informative, and allow the writer to repeat five or six keywords without that repetition sounding awkward to the reader.

Visually pleasing web pages are also part of quality content. Plenty of graphics (with keywords in the image titles and in the captions) will please your visitor.  For example, let’s say you are uploading several photos of your hot sauce line. The photos should not be titled, “Hotsauce1.jpg,” “Hotsauce2.jpg” and so on, but rather “besthotsauceintown.jpg,” “Sizzlinghotsauce.jpg,” and so on. It’s just another way to add keywords to your webpage content.

3. Continue to build quality links

The more “backlinks” you have – links from other sites to yours – the better. This has always been the case. How to get backlinks? Use your social media, make guest posts on other’s sites, and so on. Don’t make the mistake of searching out blogs with comment sections, where you post an unrelated comment and then your link. Those are not quality links and will harm rather than help your SEO – as well as annoy the blog owner!

By continuing to generate quality content – informative and well written, with keywords well-integrated into the text – you will place yourself in a position for excellent SEO results.