What is website content?
Website content is content that should help the user NOT be written for the search engines alone. However, if you write great content that relates to you and/or your business then SEO and the search engines will follow. The most important thing to remember here (and Google says this also) is to write for the website visitor and not for the search engines.
The content on your website can be frequently asked questions, product or service descriptions, reviews, tips, and tricks, or anything that will help your website visitor.
TIP: Find questions that are asked for a lot online, Google the question, then see if anyone answered it yet. If not, this would be a great one to answer on your website!
How to Write Good Content for a Website
How to Write SEO Content for a Website
Writing SEO content that helps both your website visitors and the search engines doe not have to be hard. If you write useful content for your website visitors SEO and the search engines will follow.
For example, if you write a great article on extra things that you can do (high volume searches) with your product that nobody else has thought of (low competition) people will find it popular and link and/or share your content (be sure to add like and share buttons to your article). Liking (via social media like Facebook and Twitter) will create authority for your website (a ranking algorithm in Google) and sharing (linking to) your content will create backlinks (websites that link to your article) to your website that will also build the authority of your website plus raise your domain and page strength (which is in the Google Algorithm as well).
TIP: Be sure to add like and share buttons to all the pages of your website to help promote yourself!
What kind of website uses keywords to locate content?
The websites that do this job are SaaS (software as a service) websites. You can enter in a topic into the keyword tool and look at the results
Below is an example from using the SaaS Ahrefs.
From looking at this report you can get an idea on what is popular to write about. Another source you can use is Google Trends. In this case it did not help very much.
TIP: Using a professionally paid SaaS will help you a lot better than using Google trends or other free sources because what SaaS software provides that Google Trends and other sources do not is how many times it is searched for per month, how difficult it is to rank for, how many websites link to it already, use skyscraper link building, etc.
How to Optimize Website Content for SEO
Don’t forget to write for the visitor and not the search engines! But, by doing a little research you can find out what popular topics and questions there are out there that relate to you or your business and use that to help your visitors AND help rank in the search engines.
You can optimize the content for your website by making sure that it all relates to one another. Create headings and sub-headings of questions people asked online that relate to the topic, avoid keyword stuffing (black hat technique that repeats the keyword phrase over and over again), and run it through a tester like Yoast which is a plugin that you can add to your WordPress website. Yoast looks at it with an SEO eye and gives you tips on how to do better. For example, provide internal linking, provide external links (for external links be sure to set them to ‘nofollow’ in certain circumstances), warn you if you use your keyword phrase too many times, how to use images and their alt tags, etc.
Where to get Content for my Website
The best place to get content from is from yourself or someone that works for you that knows your business well because no one will know the topic better than yourself or someone who works for you.
You could hire a freelancer to do the job but it can get pricy. A professional copywriter will charge anywhere from $275 to $500 per page but you know the job will be done right. A cheaper freelancer may not get you the results you want or if they do they may not have the background knowledge of the search engines as a professional copywriter would.
There are websites out there where you can get free content to use on your website but usually, they have links to other websites within the article to help the people who paid them to write content for them. In the end, you would be helping out the people that the article links to more than yourself. The upside to using a service like this is that you can get free content quickly. The downside is that there may be many other copies of this article out there and it won’t help you much in the search engines.
How to edit WordPress Website Content
How to Manage Content on a Website
For WordPress, which is the best CMS (content management system) software out there for ease of use and marketing, the best thing you can do is create post categories and put your articles under the correct category.
Another thing to do is to link from one article to another article that provides more in-depth discussion about what you were talking about in the first article. This is called siloing your content and building internal linking of your website which helps with ranking your website organically.
One thing that I discovered while using WordPress is the use of tags. WordPress using the Yoast plugin can include the tags in your sitemap file (a list of pages of your website that helps the search engine crawl and index [find easier] the pages of your website). So make sure that you have descriptive tags with each of your articles.
Lastly, WordPress has several options for the images of your website that you upload. Don’t just upload the image and forget about it. Here is what you can do with images in WordPress.
- File Name – You can make sure that your image file name uses proper English (like farmhouse.jpg) instead of a nonsense name (like a878ggg.png). Do this before uploading it to your website.
- Alternate Text – Also known as ‘alt tag’ is used by readers that read the text to blind web surfers. Remember this and don’t abuse this tag! Just add an accurate description of the image if it contains text or represents a graph.
- Caption – This is the text that appears below the image on the website. This can be used to your advantage as well.
- Description – This is an underutilized option that WordPress offers. Think of it as where to put a long description of the image without messing up the readers that the blind visitors use. I have discovered that by providing a detailed description that one of my customers started ranking for one of the products he sells by image alone and not the page! Then people click on the image and go to the website. Having more than one avenue to your website is always a nice thing!
TIP: Make sure you utilize image descriptions, do internal linking, and organize your content under folders or categories to help promote yourself and gain more organic rankings.
How to Evaluate Website Content
Along with using the Yoast plugin mentioned above, you can test the readability of your article by any number of free online tools. Here is one called Readable that you can test your content on. Unfortunately, the average reading level in the United States is only 6th grade so you may have to dumb down your content a bit.
By using SaaS software or using an analytics program like Google Analytics you can see which content is the most popular so you know what to write more about. More importantly, you can set up a custom report and goals in Google to track if people that read your article bought your products, signed up for a newsletter, etc. then decide which type of content brings you the most business (conversion rates).
TIP: Make sure you monitor your content so you know how to improve your website and business.
How to Organize Website Content
Like I mentioned earlier it is important to organize your content by putting them under the correct Post Categories and Folders. By doing this you create a better UX Design (user-experience design) to help the visitor find your content easier and is a nice SEO-way of helping you out in the search engines.
For example, Google Maps will now start including blog posts on its maps. This means that you can have a folder entitled, “Escanaba Michigan” and any articles that review restaurants found in this city can be put under this folder. Make sure you include a NAP (name, address, phone number) and review in the article to increase your chances of your blog post showing up in Google Maps. You can read more details of this by following the link.
How to Update Website Content Online
Updating the content on your website is easy, but what about all the other websites that published your content (with and without your permission) online?
You may have found that you have an old article that is pretty dated online but is still a popular topic. The first thing to do is determine if this article is worth republishing by looking at your stats (using a SaaS or Google Analytics) to determine if it is still getting a lot of visits, shares, likes, etc.
Republishing old content is actually helpful in the SEO world and is recommended. After you update the article on your website you can do a search in Google for your article by putting it in quotes like this.
“your article title here”
This will search online for EXACTLY this phrase using the words in EXACTLY this order. This helps narrow down the search a lot. You can then contact that website owner and let them know you have an updated version of the article and provide it for them.
TIP: You may find links to your website that no longer exist. You can create a 301 redirect or give them the correct URL to use. If you find a website that you didn’t give permission to use your article you can let them know that it is okay as long as they provide a link back to your website.
Which report can show how well particular sections of website content performed?
There are several reports that you can use to do this. The one that comes to mind first is Google Analytics because you can track how many times it is visited and if you have goals and funnels hooked up you can track how many product purchases were made from people that read your article.
By using SaaS software like Ahrefs, SEMRush, or Moz you can track even more information like how many times your article has been liked, shared, and linked to from other websites which is also an important factor to consider when doing SEO on a website.
But these sources do not tell you how particular sections of website content performs. To do this I am trying a new service out there called Hotjar that shows the heat map (an image showing the areas of the article that people click on the most) and records their movements to help determine which areas of the article are the most important. I might write a review on it later after I try it out for awhile. I am currently using the free version.
How long should you wait before republishing a piece of content to a new website?
I would wait until the content has become dated before I do this for your own website. If you want to republish the content to another website or social media then you should do it this way.
Publish the content on your own website then wait until Google finds (crawls and indexes) it on your website. When they find it they will include it in their listings. You can check to see if they indexed your article by typing the article title in this Google Search Operator like this.
site:yourwebsite.com “your article title here”
Once it has been found (crawled and indexed) by Google it is safe to publish elsewhere.
TIP: Why do it this way? So that your website gets the credit for your article in Google’s eyes instead of someone else. That way it is more likely that you will be listed first in the SERPs (search engine results pages).
Well, that pretty much wraps things up. There is much more detail I could have added to this but I wanted to keep fairly brief.
If you want to learn more about keyword research you can read my article, “Keyword Research in SEO: Part 1″.
If you want to learn how to use the SaaS software SEMRush you can read my article, “How to see how a particular page ranks in SEMRush“.
Take care and have a great day!
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