Semalt: Why Is Content Important To SEO?
When content is optimized for search engines, it can catapult any website to the top of SERP. But for this to happen, content must be in its best form. While content can make a website, it can also destroy one. There are many ways poor content can attract Google's penalties.
The purpose of this article is to help you understand why Semalt invests so much in creating the best content for our clients by showing you how important content is for SEO. As we dive in, you will understand web content better and what value it has in SEO.
Let's get started!
What Is Content
Content goes by several definitions. Every marketer has a unique understanding of the subject, so there is no universal or standard definition. But here are some definitions we find appropriate.
Heidi Cohen defines content as a form of high-quality information that is useful and conveys a story being presented in a contextual reality manner with the goal of promoting an emotional response or engagement from an audience. Content can be delivered live or asynchronously via several forms such as video, text, presentations, and audio.
Note: while this definition is sound, not all contents you find online would meet these standards as there are contents that are of low quality and aren't useful.
A simpler definition of content will be Derek Halmpern's. He says content can come in any form with the purpose of informing, entertaining, enlightening or teaching the people who consume it.
Once again, this definition only applies to good content, which at the very least is useful and relevant to its targeted audience.
By removing the relevance of quality from content, you can begin to call your text messages and captions content. At this point, we believe you should have a good understanding of what content is while also comprehending that contents aren't created in text alone but also videos, images, and audio formats.
What Is The Value Of Content In SEO
Google, the now ranking No1 search engine, processes over 6.7 billion searches daily. And for them to keep on being No1, they must be well suited to answer these questions to their user's satisfaction.
When Larry Page and Sergey Brin co-founded Google in 1998, their mission was to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Google no doubt provides useful and relevant search results in a fraction of a second. The way Google organized its information changed as it developed. Its programmers coded new algorithms that made the search engine faster, smarter, more dependable, and accurate.
Part of Google's mission is to provide useful and relevant results. In a simpler way, that is Google saying that it is dedicated to providing useful and more relevant content. To achieve this, Google ranks the contents on SERP based on their order of usefulness and relevance to the search engine user. As content creators, this is a clear message that for the content we create to have any SEO value, it must first be beneficial to searchers.
Google helped us by showing us how to make sure our content is beneficial by using the following practices:
- Useful and informative: content should carry all the useful information regarding the topic, brand, or business. If you're opening a hotel, your content should tell your opening and closing hours, location, contact information, and a blog to give clients the latest updates.
- Credible: show how credible your site is by using facts, original well-proven researches, links, reviews, citations, and testimonials from past customers.
- More valuable and useful than the competition: if your website teaches how to cook, ensure that your content does it better than anyone else. Your content should bring value, a unique perspective, a better and more effective way to cook that difficult mean. You should be better.
- High quality: your content should be unique, well-written, and specific. Your content is created primarily to create a good user experience and not to rank, so don't bother stuffing keywords. As long as it puts the best smile on the face or mind of your reader, you're doing it right.
- Engaging: good web content shouldn't be boring. Your web design isn't the only tool you have to decorate your site, contents can be colorful, and it brings life to a website. Engage the eyes of your readers by using artistic font styles and colors once in a while to draw and keep the attention of your readers.
By ticking off all these boxes on your list of "How to make quality web content," you're set to storm the first page of SERP.
Creating good content sadly isn't the only part of this puzzle; there is a technical part to creating SEO-friendly content.
"The SEO value of web contents depends on how valuable, engaging, credible and informative it is."
The Importance Of Optimizing Сontent
The simple answer for this without optimized SEO content, you wouldn't rank. But we guess you've already figured this out. Here we will be discussing why there are multiple factors to consider when creating SEO content.
Optimizing content is best done while creating content by ensuring the content is audience-centric and follows the requirements we've spelled out in the previous section.
Audience-centric means content that focuses on what the audience wants to hear. As we've stated, producing relevant and useful content is what you must-do if you want to rank in search engines. There is, however, a technical side to things.
Optimizing your content technically involves including elements like keywords, meta titles, meta description, and URLs.
How To Create Optimized Content
Performing Keyword Research To Determine Your
While your main goal should be creating audience-centric content, keyword research is vital as it ensures that your target audience can find your content via search engines. When choosing your keywords and topic, here are some things you should consider:
- Focusing on long-tail keywords
- Use proven keyword research tools
- Avoid highly competitive keywords with massive search numbers
- Your topics should match your keywords
Develop Your Outline And Format Your Contents For Optimal Readability
While creating your outline, ensure your content is broken down into small bits. Online readers have a very short attention span, which means they need to get to the most important part of the content quickly.
Keeping it short also makes it easier to keep things interesting, which will extend the attention span of your audience.
To keep things short, paragraphs should be 2 - 3 sentences long and use sub-headings as much as possible. Keeping things short and simple improves your engagement and readability, which impacts your organic rankings.
Stick To Your Topic And Keywords
As you write your content, always keep your topic and target keyword in mind. Avoid writing everything and anything within a single piece of content. Keep it specific and focused on your target keywords. Focusing on dozens of keywords is a huge waste of time and prevents you from creating useful and relevant content.
Focusing on a good number of keywords will help you stay focused and create hyper-relevant contents to support the keywords and your topic.
Use Backlinks Throughout Your Content
Since Google considers credibility as an important SEO factor, linking to trustworthy, authoritative, and relevant sites is a way of ensuring that search engines see your content as credible.
Be sure that the backlinks you use in your content are actually relevant to the topic you're discussing.
Pro tip: it is recommended that the links you use are six words or fewer.
Other Methods Of Optimizing Your Content Include:
- Optimizing your title tags
- Optimize your met description
- Include keywords in the page's URL
Conclusion
Optimized content can drastically improve your visibility on search engines. Without visibility and exposure, your content would end up in the graveyard of search engines. If your content falls below the third page of SERP, nobody will see it; nobody will share it. But with the right content, it becomes easier to gain visibility and traffic.
Sometimes, the solution to your ranking problem can be as simple as writing optimized unique meta descriptions for all your pages. If you want visibility and exposure, you need better content on your website.