DAY 14: Optimizing Your Content

“Success without honor is an unseasoned dish; it will satisfy your hunger, but it won’t taste good.”

- Joe Paterno -

Always write with your readers in mind

This statement is by far one of my favorite and one I abide to strongly. Now, because you should always write with your readers in mind, doesn’t mean that you can’t do something for the search engines too, right?

Today’s lesson is not focused on what you should do to write an article that is pleasing for your readers, but instead focuses on the small tweaks you can do to make your great post search engine friendly.

Why Should You Optimize Your Content?

I mean, if you have been reading any bit about SEO before, you may probably have heard things like:

• On-page optimization doesn’t matter anymore; it’s all about off-page optimization.
• Google doesn’t care about keyword density anymore.
• Write for your visitors, not the search engines.

So why should you bother with optimizing your content?

• The value of your off-page optimization is enhanced by matching on-page optimization. For an anchor text link to be really powerful, the same keyword should exist on the destination page.
• Google new algorithm is based on concept relevancy, which includes synonyms and related search terms within your niche, not just the keyword itself. Unless you have those terms on page, you may fall down in the relevancy scale.
• Write for your visitors to keep them on your pages, but don’t forget that it’s the search engines that bring you those visitors in the first place.

Content Keyword Research

The very first step before writing anything is always the same, and that’s keyword research.

Go back to Google AdWords Keyword Tool, and run a search for the main topic of your post. For this example, I’m going to use “Keyword Density” again.

Again, export the results to Excel, and refine your keyword list by relevancy only, not search volume (even if a search term doesn’t have enough data for search volume, if it’s relevant, keep it in your list.)

Now, divide your keywords into 2 lists:

• Keywords with search volume.
• Keywords without search volume.

By analyzing quickly the search volume of the keywords in the first list, you can come up quite easily with the following 3 categories of keywords (like we did for the page title):

• Page Concept – “keyword density”
• Main Keywords – “google keyword density” and “keyword density seo”
• Secondary Keywords – “keyword density tutorial”, “keyword density percentage”, “calculate keyword density”, “optimum keyword density” and “optimal keyword density”.

For all the keywords in the first list, strip down any duplicate word, in my example, my list looks like this:

• Keyword
• Density
• Calculate
• Google
• Optimum
• Optimal
• Tutorial
• Percentage
• SEO

Now, for each of those terms, go and research known synonyms, and add those words to the list.

Here are some examples of the terms I’ve been able to add:

• research
• search
• explore
• best
• calculate
• compute
• work out
• reckon
• figure

Now, just like you did for your list, go to your second list, and strip away all duplicated words. This time, it is not necessary to research synonyms, though if you really want to do if, you can, just know that it’s not necessary at this point.

Ok, good job, this may not make sense to you yet, but it will very soon don’t worry.

Optimize Your Content Structure

Like everything, you need structure if you want results, the same goes with your content.

No secret here, we are just applying what we learned in school on how to write a good essay.

Our work is to prepare an optimized framework in which we can write our quality content to please both the search engines and our readers.

Page Title

Based on the previous lesson, we already know how to write a SEO page title for our content.

Content Title

This title is the most important content you have on your page, so it must be enclosed with h1 tags.

If you don’t know about h1 tags, I strongly recommend you to read my article “Did You Get Your Heading Tags All Wrong?”

Again, just like the Page Title, you want your main keywords to be here, the difference is since you already have a much optimized Page Title (probably with the same keywords), and it’s a good opportunity to write something more human visitors friendly.

I chose “Google Keyword Density SEO Tutorial”, but I could have went with something like “How to calculate Google keyword density”, or something like that rather than just a mash up of keywords, but I thought that it wasn’t so bad in that case.

Sub Title

The sub titles are the second most important element in your page content; therefore we must enclose them with h2 tags.

Since it wasn’t possible to fit all our keywords in the Page Title or the Content Title, now is a good opportunity to insert our secondary keywords in key positions.

In my post, I use two subtitles:

• “Optimal Keyword Density Tutorial”
• “How To Calculate Keyword Density Percentage”

Introduction

Remember when I said optimization is about keyword density, keyword proximity and keyword prominence?

This means that if you want your page to be highly optimized, the search engine should find a good deal of your keywords with related search term close to them, and as early as possible on the page.

This is where the introduction comes in play.

Here’s the introduction I used on my post:

“Does keyword density still matters or not and how to calculate it. Proper search engine optimization (SEO) requires you to research and work out the best keywords. People always try to figure out how to calculate the optimum keyword density for their pages. Although research tells that Google doesn’t care, I reckon that some of you would like to know how to calculate keyword density. In today’s SEO tutorial, we will explore how search engines compute keyword density percentage.”

Now, did you find anything odd about my introduction? Probably not because there’s nothing odd about it, it’s a properly written introduction.

So what is so special about it?

Do you remember when we created a list of our keyword with volume, and how we research synonyms for those keywords too?

Look closely at each word in that introduction; all my keywords and all their known synonyms are in used here!

That piece of text is not only full of keyword density about my main keywords (without obvious excess usage or keyword stuffing), with a strong keyword proximity as all the terms are very nearby one another, and highly relevant terms (use of synonyms) for latent semantic indexing (LSI) algorithm; since it’s the introduction, it’s placed at the top of the page which means huge keyword prominence.

Paragraphs

This is where you write your content, just do it naturally but take extra care to add all the individual words you stripped down from your second list (the one with dramatically low search volume).

Having those terms (even if they are spitted) within your content gives you a chance to appear in the search results for those keywords, and also any kind of weird long tail search.

Keep in mind that half of the searches made on the search engines are unlisted long tail search, they may not have a lot of search volume individually but there’s truly a throng of them daily, so don’t miss out on that!

Exercise

Now that you know what it takes to optimize your pages of content and the reason behind those steps, it’s now time to put them into practice.

The easiest way I found to do that is first to write your content naturally and then optimize it, this way your writing will have a more natural flow for your readers.

If you still have questions, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts online about this lesson below.