How to Create Content for Search Engine Visibility

If you have been in the online marketing game for any length of time, you’ve figured out that there is a lot more to search engine visibility than just keywords. You should also consider the secondary purposes of your site’s content.

For example, if you sell products or services on your site, you should think about creating content that will convert visitors and encourage them to purchase from your site. The cardinal rule of web content creation for search engine optimization is originality. Don’t use content that is published on other sites, even if you have permission. Google and other search engines will penalize your site if they detect identical content on other sites. Don’t be too concerned about the SEO ramifications if other sites steal, or scrape, your content. Search engines are becoming increasingly aware of who was the original publisher of the content.

Selecting Your Keywords

Keyword choice is crucial to helping visitors find your site. Keyword phrases should be closely related to the product, service, or information that your site is based on. For example, if your website sells DVDs, “buy DVDS” may seem like an obvious keyword choice.  However, to make your site stand out more in search results, you should also choose more unique phrases. For best results, select phrases that relate to different aspects of your business. For example, “foreign language DVDs” or “discount children’s DVDs” are more distinctive than “buy DVDs.”

It is easier to get on top of search results for a more unique keyphrase, such as “discount children’s DVDs,” than it is for “buy DVDs,” which relates to many thousands of sites. Alternatively, research other phrases that people use to search for your main product. Google provides an excellent keyword research tool that is free to use, and will help you see how many searches are made per month for specific keywords, as well as how much competition there already is for each keyword.

Decreasing Your Bounce Rate with Compelling Content

Compelling content that catches the eye will reduce your site’s bounce rate and encourage readers to visit more of your site’s pages. For compelling web content, focus on issues that are both current and relevant to your target audience. Write in an active tone of voice, and use bullet points, subheadings and short paragraphs to make the content more accessible to the reader.

Integrating Keywords Into Your Content

Keyword density is important. If you overdo it and include your keyword in every other sentence, search engines will interpret this as “spam,” which will have a negative effect on your ranking. Conversely, having your keyword appear enough times in the content communicates to the search engine that these keywords are highly relevant to your page and should be indexed accordingly. Using the keyword approximately three times for each 100 words of content is a good density. A density of more than 8 percent will likely hurt your site.

Writing Your Own Content vs. Buying Content

Writing compelling content that has a favorable effect on site visibility is learned skill. Furthermore, since you should have content appear on every page that you would like to rank in the search engine results, it may be that your site requires more content than you can easily produce. Some custom content companies will help you select the best keywords for your site, though you can also determine your own.

About author of this post:

Adam Mintz has been involved in SEM since 2008. He originally ran PPC Campaigns for an online retailer who specialized in baby equipment. He is now on the operations team at Servio where he is in-charge of web content development.