Bloggers and online marketers juggle various things at the same time. If you have been working in the blogosphere for a while, you must have seen some blogs that rank on top in Google.
Have you ever thought about why they always rank on the first page of Google?
The answer might be YES.
Turns out, you do think about those blogs.
My question was a curveball; they don’t “always” rank on the first page of Google.
There would be untapped 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. Grab a cup of coffee. Sit on your couch. Turn off your Netflix for 15 minutes.
Let me start with some basics.
What’s SEO Content?
SEO content is a keyword-driven content that blogs and websites publish to get traction from the search engines in the form of website visitors. One can tell the difference between the SEO content and other content right off the bat. Several indicators determine 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 out to the target audience
- It helps search engines distinguish websites to determine the type
- It provides a chance for blogs and websites to dominate search engine results
- The keyword insertion would not have been possible if it wasn’t for the SEO content
- The SEO content allows websites and blogs to convert visitors 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 other hand, it’s necessary to understand what people are looking for and what search terms they are using to find information, data, or products. Keyword Research is the strategy that is used to figure out the search terms that people are using to find out the solutions.
Content marketers, bloggers, and SEOs lookout for high-performance keywords to target and make money from various methods.
What is Keyword Research?
Keyword research is a process of digging and finding the untapped keywords to target through content creation. It is an essential part of the content marketing plan. The core purpose of keyword research is to create content around the keywords that have some attention.
Keyword research is mostly done through keywords software that provides insights into the searched keywords.
Long Tail Pro is a paid online tool for finding the best keywords to target. A lot of bloggers and affiliate marketer prefer this tool for hunting down the best keywords to use in their content.
UberSuggest is a free tool from Neil Patel. It does what any paid keyword tool would do for you. It helps you analyze and find suitable keywords to target.
Keywordtool.io is a paid keyword research tool that assists people in finding keywords with low competition and high demand.
Here are four key elements of keyword research:
1. Search Volume
The search volume shows the total number of searches with a specific keyword in a month. A keyword with 500+ searches could be targeted. However, there is no standard rule for this; some bloggers prefer keywords with over 2,000 searches and others go after the ones with 300+ searches a month.
2. Competition Level
The competition level is the SEO difficulty of a keyword. If the SEO difficulty is high, it means the competition is fierce in that area. So bloggers and SEO experts look out for low-competition keywords to dominate that space and rank their articles for better conversion.
3. Cost Per Click (CPC)
One of the reasons why keyword research is important because it tells you the cost per click (CPC) of the keywords, which plays a vital role in the digital marketing field. Most keyword research tools tell you the CPC of the keywords you’re analyzing. The reason being it’s important for the bloggers and SEOs to know the value of the keywords in Google.
4. Trend
The trend section tells the demand for the keyword in the last 12 months or so. If a keyword’s trend is on the rise or looks stable, it means the keyword is hot, which is a positive sign. Perhaps, one shouldn’t be targeting the keywords with a declining trend.
Types of SEO: On-Page and Off-Page
Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the process of fine-tuning a website to provide search 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 your website, you got to optimize your website or blog for search engines to make that 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 field which is difficult to encapsulate in a few lines. The SEO experts utilize dozens of strategies that mostly fall in two main categories of SEO.
1. On-Page SEO
The name speaks for itself, though. The on-page SEO refers to the search engine optimization techniques that we apply on the website pages. There are lots of things that SEO experts perform on the website pages to ensure that search engines read all those signals and consider showcasing the site in the search engine result pages, also known as SERP.
Here are a few essentials of the On-Page SEO in 2019:
1. Keywords
The chosen keywords come into play when we do on-page SEO. Keywords are selected based on the intent of the prospective audience and the solution we could provide through our website or content.
The keywords should be included in the various sections of the website. The core part is the selection of the keywords. Once you choose the right keywords that truly represent your business or purpose, you get closer to success.
The ultimate goal of the keywords selection is the organic traffic from the search engines so choose the keywords wisely.
2. Meta Tags
Meta tags are essential website codes that carry the information about a website page or an image on the world wide web. From the SEO standpoint, it’s vital to have proper meta tags written in your website pages. You’ll read more why meta tags are extremely important, later on.
Meta tags are web page components that help search engines understand what the certain page or image 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
Images optimization is a process of ensuring that the images which are being used on the website are getting along perfectly. The primary concern about the images when being included in the article is their size. A lot of bloggers use a plugin called Smush.it WordPress tool for compressing the images.
There is another WordPress plugin called EWWW Image Optimizer to optimize their images for the blog posts.
5. Page loading Speed
One of the important elements of ranking a website or a page in search engines is the page loading speed. The better the page loading speed, the higher the website ranking in search engines. Sure, there are dozens of factors that help search engines determine what website page ranks where in the SERP. Learn more about how 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 strategies happen outside of the website platform, which is why it’s called off-page SEO.
SEO has a wide spectrum, and to succeed in search engine optimization, you need to find a balance between the on-page and off-page SEO techniques. You may be able to pull off good ranking by focusing in on just one type of SEO, but a handsome balance between both these strategies would give extravagant results.
If it’s wasn’t for the vitality of the off-page SEO, most SEO experts would only discuss the on-page SEO. Notice that you’d always read content on both on-page and off-page SEO.
Here are four ways to do off-page SEO:
1. Link Building
Linking building is a process of creating backlinks on others’ websites through different strategies such as getting mentions, blog commenting, and building relationships with bloggers. Most blogs and websites don’t have do-follow link policies towards any outbound link, while some have a different approach.
Linking building is a slow process and it requires a lot of struggle and patience. Make sure that you’re trying to get backlinks from the most relevant and high-ranked blogs and sites.
2. Guest Posting
Guest posting has been considered dead for a while now, but it still works somewhere along the lines. The problem with guest posting is that bloggers and SEO experts started guest posting just for SEO, which pretty much turned a good off-page SEO strategy into a money-machine.
Now, a lot of sites and blogs are afraid of being penalized by Google so they don’t focus much on guest posting or don’t provide do-follow links. However, some bloggers accept guest posts and provide do-follow links, but they try to keep the standard of the content higher than the average blogs.
3. Outreach Campaign
An outreach campaign refers to the strategy which involves reaching out to the bloggers and providing them with resources to use in their content and mention the source.
If you’re a blogger, you might have received an email saying that they found a blog post of yours, which is similar to their content. They request to link out to their resource not just to increase the authenticity of blogger’s content, but also to give a backlink to a credible resource.
Here are three common outreach campaign tools:
- Infographics: They provide beautifully designed, useful infographics to publish and link back to them.
- Articles: They often send you their well-written, long articles to check out and link out to the source.
- Ebooks: They provide ebooks for free and request to mention the website URL in the content.
- In-depth Content
One of the secrets of winning over bloggers to link out to your site or source is writing in-depth content. When you publish valuable and long-form content in your niche, chances are, you’d be helping out dozens of people. Some of them would be so happy that they’d graciously mention your blog somewhere in their content.
Once that starts to 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 of mentions in the content.
So creating in-depth and valuable content is a win-win situation.
Types of Keywords
When you pursue SEO, there are a lot of things that you get to learn along the way. You might have heard about the long-tail keywords before, but there are a few more types of keywords you should know before moving further.
Here are four types of keywords you should know:
Short-tail Keywords
Short-tail keywords are one-word keywords that are commonly used words such as “books” or “dogs” and they are extremely difficult to target because of their generic nature. 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 wonder why we should bother understanding short-tail keywords when long-term keywords give us a better chance to rank in search engines. The answer is that short-tail keywords help us in developing another type of keywords, which you’ll read next.
Mid-tail Keywords
Mid-tail keywords are the keywords that develop a balance between the two major types of keywords such as short-tail and long-tail keywords. They are often used to create a balance between the two extremes. Their moderate nature brings in the combination 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 they help in writing content, but they could also be useful in clarifying the picture. They are, of course, worth understanding and utilizing, where necessary.
Long-tail Keywords
The long-tail keywords are long-form search terms that people use when they know what exactly they’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, high clickability ratio, and better conversion.
The intent, however, is something you need to figure out, meaning, if you clear what your target audience is thinking and you have the answer to their query, you can win using 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 all of these keywords have four words. The thing about the long-tail keywords is that they could be longer than four words as well. All you need to make sure that you have a legit tool that tells you that this keyword does exist, meaning, people are using it for searches.
LSI Keywords
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords are the search phrases that are similar to the main keywords. The words “semantic” means related to meaning. The idea behind the LSI keywords is that they help your site rank well because of the relativity of the keywords with the context of your copy. The higher the relativity, the bigger the opportunity. Therefore, LSI keywords are essential to 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 into the 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 and foremost step is the keyword placement in the meta tags, which means that the keyword must appear in the page title, description, and keyword tags. If you’re running a static PHP or HTML site, head over to this meta tag generator and create your meta tags for free.
If you’re using WordPress CMS, you can easily manage meta tags for each page and post using your SEO plugin like Yoast SEO.
Most WordPress users and bloggers prefer Yoast SEO, but there is an alternative to Yoast SEO called All-in-one-SEO Pack. Fee free to try out this plugin and make sure that you aren’t leaving meta tags empty for any post or page in WordPress.
2. Use the Keyword in a Subheading
A subheading is vital in SEO content because it’s written in bold and bigger text than a normal copy. Not only visitors instantly look at the subheadings, but search engines also read the H2 text, especially when it’s bold. The H2 refers to the heading 2 (text size) in the word editors.
The keyword mentioning in, at least, one subheading is a common practice among the SEO experts. They believe that this practice carries weight, especially when it comes to signaling search engines about the important text element.
3. Use the Keyword in the first and last 100 words
It’s extremely important to use the keyword in the first 100 words of the article or website copy. The reason is that the first few words from the website copy show up in the search engines as snippets. Understandably, search engines bots read the first few lines of the website copy or article to understand the content. So it turns out to be a huge ranking factor in the search engines.
A lot of experts also believe that it’s necessary to use the keyword in the closing paragraph as well to ensure that you dominate over competition. However, it’s also important to establish that keyword stuffing for the sake of ranking is a no-go.
4. Insert the Keyword in the Image meta tags
Some bloggers pay close attention to the keyword density and bolding the keywords in the copy, but they underestimate the strength of image meta tags. Images SEO is an essential part of the overall SEO strategy. There are four essential things in image meta tags, which are the title, caption, alt text, and description.
These tags help search engines identify the images. As a result, the blog or website ends up getting organic traffic through images.
5. Add LSI Keywords to your Copy
I’ve explained what 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 engines about the relevancy of your content with the keywords.
Adding LSI keywords not only helps in improving your SEO, but it also helps you in lead generation. The reason is that it all comes to the relevancy of the keywords with the cause. To put simply, LSI keywords strengthen your narrative on a certain subject because search engines could read the relevant information on the very page of your website.
6. Do Internal Linking
Internal linking is a process of linking a page to another page of the same domain. The purpose of internal linking is to provide users a chance to go through other relevant resources from the same website to clarify the context of the copy.
Moreover, in technical SEO language, we engage visitors and stop from leaving the site. All an internal link does is that it drives the visitor to another page of the site. As a result, the visitor spends more time on our website.
Search engines consider internal linking as a signal of credibility because when a site has internal resources to link to, it shows authenticity and effectiveness of the content. So internal linking could turn out to be a game-changer in your on-page SEO.
7. Optimize Images for SEO
Image SEO has a significant role in on-page SEO in 2019. One of the reasons is that Google Images is a huge source of organic traffic for blogs and websites. All of that traffic comes to the images of the sites. There are a couple of things that one should 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, the team at Yoast wrote about the image SEO to help explain why it’s vital to do so and how to do it. Plus, you’ll understand why images are important for on-page SEO.
Utilize the image compression tools such as reSmush.it for compressing the images automatically in your WordPress site.
Moreover, you can manually optimize the images using the tool called Compressor.io. The purpose of sharing a tool is to emphasize that this particular thing is necessary for the cause.
My Final Words
If you’re trying to do on-page SEO in 2019, besides consuming loads of content from different SEO and content marketing experts, experiment with strategies.
The more you test out 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 are surefire ways to rank articles and get traffic, but it doesn’t mean your every article 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 the SEO success lies in putting in the work, a lot of work.
I implore you to don’t let a few failures stop you from achieving what you want to achieve for your 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.
