Optimizing Your Content

All the content that goes on your site or blog, or that you submit to the web, should be thoroughly optimized. This goes for text, photos, videos, articles, landing pages, press releases, advertisements – each and every snippet of content that you post should be optimized.

If you get in the habit early on, this won’t be so hard. All you have to do is get in the proper mindset! If you started out right, and have your lists of keywords, you can check it over each time you sit down to write an article or mock up an ad. Including something each time will become a good habit.

Rishi touched on video optimization yesterday – remember, the same thing goes for pictures on the web – make sure you tag all your graphic content so the spiders can index it accurately.

As far as text content – the major mistakes made have to do with incorrect keyword optimization. You need to be sure that you use your keywords in your content in a natural fashion, with attention to placement in the header or title, the beginning of body of text, the middle and the end.

Don’t fall into the trap of stuffing however – Google will not appreciate attempts to game the system and you will end up with content that is garbled and difficult to read. Remember, optimize for the user first, the search engines second! Too many keywords are as bad as too few.

For your website pages, you will want to optimize for keywords that you are trying to rank for for your site. For articles, you can concentrate on the long tail, answering questions such as how and where, and giving useful information that will encourage readers to follow through to your site.

For press releases, you can adopt a general tone – blatant sales promotion is frowned on, so focus on remaining informational and make it sound like you have more valuable info that the consumer would do well to check out. Use your keywords here as well.

Spread the love! Take each article and rework it into a blog post, a press release, another article for a different directory, a squidoo lens, an ad series, a video, a How to or Top ten list, a comment or two for forums, and an extra page for your website.

If you make a point to treat each article to this process, you will always have fresh and interesting content hitting the search engines. Remember to link back to your main site whenever possible, whether to the home page or a deep link to an inner page, and don’t pass up the opportunity to optimize your anchor text in each link.

Add each webpage to your sitemap as you go along, and keep a log of every piece opf content you have out on the web – where it is, and what page it links to in case you ever change a URL.

If you do it right, every time, you will soon have a content rich network that will optimize your site to the fullest. Tomorrow: Off To The Links!

admin