Whatever product or content your website offers, many visitors will reach it through a major search engine such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo. Giving your website the best SEO optimization possible ensures it appears at the top of these search rankings, maximizing the number of visitors to your website.
Successful search engine optimization is made up of several technical and creative factors that work together to drive traffic to your website. With good content marketing, you're aiming not only at achieving high rankings but also at creating content that people want to stay and read. Keywords, interlinks, anchor texts, meta tags, and, of course, interesting and informative pages are all part of successful SEO-optimized content.
These are the building blocks of search engine optimization and drive traffic to your website. It makes sense when creating a content marketing brief to do some research on effective and popular keywords before starting. There are plenty of tools out there to help with this such as WordStream's keyword niche finder. But remember: search engines are more sophisticated than they used to be, so "keyword stuffing" won't get you very far these days!
Providing internal links lets users navigate around the contents of your website, but, they also act as pathways that the search engine "crawlers" can use to get from one page of your site to another, allowing it to collect data from more pages of your site - this has a huge impact on SERP ranking. Providing external hyperlinks to other relevant web pages will improve your company image, making it look like an expert in the field.
The anchor text is the 'clickable' text part of a hyperlink. The most successful anchor texts are relevant to the page they're linking to while being naturally embedded into a sentence linguistically. For example, WordStream is a useful source of information about anchor texts.
A well-crafted meta tag can have a powerful impact on search engine rankings. These little snippets of text are an opportunity to give some precise information about your website. Keep them short and your keywords at the front for best results.
To ensure visitors stay on your website, make sure your content is interesting to read with plenty of relevant information and helpful links. The longer visitors stay on your landing page and click through your website, the more likely they are to buy. Sites with low-value content are also penalized by search engines and will slip down the rankings. Here are some tried-and-tested suggestions for successful content: