Remind me why I should care about SEO?
You learned in Context for Content that no matter how good your story is, if nobody ever sees it because it’s invisible to search engines – it doesn’t exist. Think of all the time and effort wasted if you can’t gain an audience for what you write. After all, isn’t a lack of readership akin to a “kiss of death” for every writer [cringe]?
Today’s writers, marketers, and PR pros need to understand that there are really two audiences their communications must reach and appeal to: humans and search engines. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a critical role in ensuring humans can find your gloriously-crafted story. So, as a content marketer, you’ll need to employ basic SEO content practices to be truly successful.
Keep a People-First Content Focus
Humans need to be drawn into the story of our product or business using facts, fear, logic, humor, etc. Though search engines have become increasingly sophisticated, they still can’t make sense of a webpage content the way a human can (yet!). That’s why the onus is on us to provide search engines with the type of content they need to connect a hopeful audience with our helpful content. Here’s what you need to know and practice to ensure our content is findable:
SEO Content Structure
Titles
Should be approximately 6o characters or less so they won’t be truncated in search engine results
Headline
The ideal length is 3-10 word
Subject Line
Aim for 28-40 characters (most openings for email campaigns)
Meta Description
A meta description is the short paragraph of text placed in the HTML of a webpage that describes its content. It appears under your page’s URL in the search results and has a max of 160 characters
Paragraph Length
This is debatable, but web reading has driven design into more “white space,” which is often less than 100 words per paragraph
Content Length
Content of between 1200-1600 words seems to drive the most engagement likely because it allows a topic to be covered in reasonable depth – and is longer than a typical marketing fluff piece of keywords
Remember: Quality Reigns Supreme
According Google’s webmaster guidelines,
“The key to creating a great [online presence] is to create the best possible experience for your audience with original and high-quality content. If people find your site useful and unique, they may come back again or link to your content on their own websites. This can help attract more people to your site over time.”
That said, the top three search engine ranking factors for content are quality, links back to your website, and RankBrain. Rankbrain is Google’s new machine learning algorithm, similar to Artificial Intelligence (AI), that is learning to understand search queries.
Ensuring your content is high quality means going the extra length to check yourself!!! Errors such as broken links, inaccurate information, grammar and spelling mistakes compromise the credibility of your content – and your company. So, be sure to show respect for your audience – and your content – by having your content edited by a third-party (yes, even the best writers become blind to their own mistakes).