Writing Content With SEO in Mind
Increasing the amount of content on your website can improve your digital marketing reach and grow your organic traffic, but the content you add should be written with a purpose. Every aspect of the content should be meaningfully placed to assist in search engine optimization to help more people find your website, either organically or through paid ads. There are a few key things to keep in mind about SEO when writing content for your organization’s website.
Internal Linking
Internal links are links in your content that bring users to another page of your website. Done properly, internal linking can increase time on site and decrease bounce rate. According to Senior Digital Strategist Tim Tompkins, lowering your bounce rate “signals to Google that your page helps answer searcher intent and often times will be shown higher in SERPs (search engine result pages).” It can also ensure your most important pages are indexed by browsers, and keep people engaged on your site. “Apart from looking at keywords and context (LSI) keywords on a page,” continues Tompkins, “search engines also look at how a site interlinks between pages. It takes cues from this to determine which pages are more important and should be given priority in SERPs.”
Outbound Linking
The first link you use as a reference to an outbound source is typically the most valuable to browsers. For example, the first outbound link on Cause Inspired’s homepage is to the Google Certified Professionals page, demonstrating our expertise in the field and indicating to web crawlers that we are comfortable citing our source and therefore are willing to pass on any benefits of our website’s domain or page authority. External links should be used when validating specific points being made by referring to proof. Verifying data goes a long way in demonstrating authority to web crawlers indexing a page, especially when linking to a website that is known to be reliable. Adding outbound links to your content is not intended to take your readers offsite, but rather to source where your information came from, which can help improve your page rank in the long run.
Keywords
Using different words for the same subject can help ensure you capture a wider audience. Not everyone will search exactly the same words, which means you need to predict the way they think. “Computers are smart, but only as smart as the information you give them,” says Tompkins. “Along with synonyms, create a list of keywords that would help provide context to the main keyword you are targeting. For instance, if your keyword is gardening, other LSI keywords you would likely include could be vegetables, plants, soil, tools, etc.” The more variation you have in your content, the broader your possible audience is. The diversification also helps give context to the crawler indexing the page.
To help you understand how your site is seen by Google’s crawler, Google offers a free tool called the Search Console, which will give you key insights of keywords and search terms that specific pages of your website are ranking for.
Increasing your site content does not always mean improving upon it. Writers should be sure to check all the boxes in SEO best practices on their current content before writing more pages of similar subject matter.
