Creating new content on your site can be so satisfying, but if it’s not getting the exposure you thought it deserved, perhaps it’s time to check in to make sure that it’s optimized as best as possible! Below is a breakdown of what you should be doing EVERY time you’re publishing new content for your site.
1) KEYWORD RESEARCH
Before you even start creating content, Keyword Research is an absolute necessity. Keyword research is the foundation anytime you’re creating new content. Has the topic for your post/video/infographic/etc. been thoroughly researched? Are people even searching for the content you’re writing? In order to find this out, Keyword Research will be your best friend.
Start out by considering your topic: is this a popular topic? Are lots of people writing about it? Is it a topic that lots of people are searching for? Next, check out what some of your “competition” is doing around this topic. To do so, simply search for the keywords you’d be looking to target to see who is ranking. Are they authoritative websites with a long history of creating awesome content? Are they creating videos? Infographics? Blog posts? News articles?
If the competition is really high, it may be worth researching a separate niche, or pivoting on the topic to provide some unique value. If the compeition is relatively low or there is crappy content ranking, this could be a great opportunity for you to step in to create something awesome!
Next, find similar keywords to the content you want to create using free tools. In fact, Kathryn created a great guide for how to do very basic keyword research using all free tools!
2) RESEARCH EXISTING CONTENT
Your time is valuable. You wouldn’t want to spend hours and hours on a blog post or some form of content for it to totally flop. But how do you know if your post has the potential to take off? Research! You can use social sharing tools and backlink tools to see how successful a post or piece of content has performed.
For example, you can use Sharedcount.com to see all social metrics for a URL. In order to find out if a URL has been linked to, you can use a tool called ahrefs.com (limited number of tests per day, so use carefully!). If a post has gotten great pickup on social media and earned links from other websites, why was that? What did they do well? How can you replicate that?
If the post has almost no social shares or links, why do you think that is? Is it due to a lack of promotion or did it totally just miss the mark with their audience? Knowing the answers to all of these questions will help you determine whether it will be worth it to pursue creating that content you’re considering.
3) WRITE FOR SCANNING
Now that you have completed your keyword research and determined that your content topic has lots of potential to earn social shares and links, it’s time for the fun part: actually writing your content! If you’re writing a new page for your website or creating a blog post, writing for scanning will be very important. Studies have shown that close to 10% of users don’t even scroll to read your content, so writing in a way that entices them to scroll is very important. In order to write for scanning, use the following guidelines:
- Use several headings and subheadings
- Use small paragraph size
- Use bullets (hey, like these!) and numbered lists
- Format text with bold, italics, underlines, and color
- Include images and/or video
- Use photo captions
- Communicate concepts visually (hey, like that keyword research graphic above!)
- Have video transcripts
4) USE SMART HEADLINES
Now that you’ve gotten a great, well-researched topic, you have proven its potential to really take off, and have written in a way that people will actually want to read, it’s time to create your headline! Check out the types of headlines that perform best here.
Is most of your audience female? It may be worth using a number in your headline! As we can see above, studies have shown that posts with numbers in the headline tend to perform best and resonate most with readers. For example, if you were writing a blog post about the best things to bring to the beach with you this summer for your female readers, you might want to try something like “The Top 10 Things You Absolutely Can’t Forget to Bring to the Beach This Summer” instead of something like “My Beach Bag Essentials”.
5) INJECT KEYWORDS
It’s important to incorporate the keywords you found in Step 1 into your content. Specifically for SEO, there are 3 main areas where you should be using your keywords.
a) In your meta titles. Your meta titles describe the content of your page to Google and users, and is one of the strongest signals you can send to a search engine to let them know what your content is about. Here are best practices for how to write keyword-rich, compelling title tags.
b) In your headings and subheadings. While headings and subheadings aren’t as strong as a signal for search engines as meta titles are, it’s still important to further reinforce your content topics within your headings and subheadings. Be sure, also, to use the proper HTML for your headings and subheadings. Your heading should be an <h1> tag, and your subheadings should be <h2>. For more on HTML h tags, click here. For example, when looking at the code for this section’s subheading, you can see that it has <h2> tags around it like so: <h2> 5) INJECTING KEYWORDS </h2>
c) In your content. This may be a no-brainer, but your content should contain some variation of the keywords that you’re targeting for the page. Don’t get too carried away though! Write for people first, and search engines second. You never want to sacrifice the quality of your content by stuffing it with a bunch of keywords.
d) In your URL. Contrary to popular belief, the title of your blog posts/page does not need to be exactly the same as your URL for that page. For example, most news websites use the title of their articles in their URLs, which tend to be long, wordy, and not optimized. For example, this New York Times article‘s URL is based off of the title of the article, but is clearly very long and not well-optimized. To cut down to only the most important words when creating your URL, try removing things like pronouns, using numbers instead of words (17 vs seventeen) and removing words like it, and the, or, etc.
6) OPTIMIZE YOUR IMAGES
Did you know that Google has no idea that the picture of those adorable Steve Madden wedges you posted on your blog or photo of your newborn niece are actually shoes or a baby? They can only read text content on the web, so they rely on code from your website to tell them what your images actually are. This presents another area of opportunity for you to optimize! There are a few things to look out for when optimizing images within your content:
a) File name: When saving images on your computer, save the the file name with descriptive text. In the Keyword Research image above, the file name is “how-to-do-keyword-research”. If you’re using more than one word in the file name, separate them with hyphens insteadofclumpingthemalltogether. Search engines are smart, but they can’t read that jibber jabber
b) Alt text: You may be familiar with alt text as the text you see on the web when you hover over an image. To a search engine, it acts as a description of what exactly your image is. You’ll see that the alt text for the Keyword research image above is “keyword research process”. In the code, it looks like this:
7) INTERNAL LINKING
An internal link is a link from one page on a website to another page on the same website. For example, this is an internal link to the AmpliFound about page. Internal linking is valuable for two reasons:
a) it helps search engines find content on your website more easily
b) it helps users find content on your website more easily
There you have it! Every time you’re publishing new content to your site, each of the items above should be taken into consideration to ensure you’re getting as many eyes on your content as possible for the hard work you’ve put in!