You know what’s even more important than creating great content to engage and inform your guests? Making sure they can actually find it!
A successful content creation campaign is all about publishing high quality content regularly, and putting the extra work in “behind the scenes” to make sure it gets seen by as much of your potential audience as possible. This includes adding relevant keywords, but also looking beyond the text itself to site navigation and architectural issues which could be preventing your work from being found.
Optimize Your Title Tags
Blog post title tags are one of the most important components of optimizing any content campaign. These tags are usually the clickable link your guests see when your content is displayed in the search results and also appear, by default, as the headline when you are sharing your blog posts on social media. Although you only have around 50-70 characters to play with, Google and the other major search engines give these short snippets of text considerable weight when deciding how pages should rank.
Since the title tags have to simultaneously tell the search engines what your page is about and entice visitors, they should include relevant keywords while offering real value at a glance to online searchers.
Integrate Keywords and Build Authority
The keywords in your blog post need to align with the optimised title tag. If you’ve come up with a title tag to focus on a keyword you’re interested in targeting, your content should concentrate on that topic. That way, you can integrate the keyword into the content several times in a way that seems natural.
But gone is the time when simply repeating the targeted keyword throughout the content was enough. Today, search engines are all about authoritative, high quality content that is of real interest and value to its intended audience. They want to see that you are a trusted source of information on the topic you are writing about, and this means shifting your focus away from a single keyword and onto the topic as a whole. When you approach your content from this angle, you’ll begin to include plenty of words that are commonly found in trusted, authoritative content on the same topic.
For example, if you want to create a blog post on “Gold Coast hikes”, you’ll do more than keep repeating these 3 words throughout your text. Of course you’ll use these words throughout, but related phrases like “bushwalking” and “picnic spots” will also come up frequently. If you can work these related phrases into your headings and even your blog categories and tags, you’ll help build the authority of your site and gain more opportunities for exposure.
Look beyond a single keyword phrase when optimizing and think about the topic as a whole. Then work all of this into your content, headings, and even use them in your blog categories and tags. This will give you more authority points and more opportunity for top exposure.
Optimise Your Images and Alt Attributes
Don’t forget to optimise your images, too!
One of the most effective ways to do this is to add Alternate Text or “alt attributes.” This is a piece of text used within the HTML code of the image, which is displayed if the image cannot load. It also acts as an important signal to help search engines understand an image’s content.
To make alt attributes work hard for you, you can include an image title, appropriate keywords and even a description. All of these elements will help give both browsing guests and Google more information about what your image is, and serve as a powerful reinforcement of your other on-page optimization techniques.
These simple techniques are just some of the ways you can use optimisation practices to ensure the content you create actually gets seen by the people that matter. Do you use any of these tactics to get your content seen by a bigger audience? Let us know in the comments below!
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