Search engine optimization is an integral part of digital marketing. Content marketers must keep important facets of SEO in mind, but it can be hard to keep track of everything. Here are five tips to keep you on top of some of the most commonly overlooked facets of SEO.
Google Search Console is an essential SEO tool that used to be known as Google Webmaster Tools. It lets you see what your content may look like in search results -- so you can catch any errors in the many fields that may affect your SEO value. It allows you to preview and control "rich cards" and "structured data," and it gives you detailed reports on how traffic is coming to your site. It's not a replacement for Google Analytics, which calculates statistics differently, but an important companion.
URLs are the building blocks of any website. You probably put a lot of thought into the main domain name of your site, and each page should be similarly appointed. Optimizing URL structures improves SEO and user experience. Don't give URLs numbers or post IDs. They should have actual words that humans can read, complete with keywords that relate to the topic at hand.
Document structure is the simple structure of your webpage. This is the one area of SEO in which years-old advice still rings true. Content marketers do themselves a favor by learning some basic HTML, including header tags and title tags. Each page should have only one
tags. These tags should be relevant to the topic at hand and use the keywords you want to target.
Some content creators go wild with internal links on anything and everything, including images and unnatural-sounding keywords squeezed into articles. Interlinking should seem natural so users will actually interact with your page. Creating lots of good content on your site gives you plenty of opportunities to create the right kinds of links. Use anchor text instead of images as your primary mode of interlinking, and use just a few per page.
Perhaps the most important thing content marketers can do to improve their SEO skills is brush up on how search engines actually work. The specifics change quite frequently, so keep current by following SEO and digital marketing blogs. The basics are that search engines crawl the web, finding links and organizing them using content found on the page -- so that when searchers type in queries, they are likely to land where they want to.
Need help with your company’s SEO or Content Marketing strategies? We can help. Send us a note at info@rmimpr.com or call us at 480-305-2017 for more information.