A lot of people forego SEO thinking that they can do it perfectly fine by themselves. Why should I pay for someone to write and optimize my content when I can do it on my own? Do I even have to pay for something that I can do myself? While having the initiative to do what needs to be done without depending too much on B2B agencies is good and all, I wouldn’t recommend it all the time – especially when you have little to no knowledge about what it is you’re about to do. For all you know, you’ll be doing your website – your business – more harm than good.
Before you dive into the nitty-gritty world of SEO, you have to be sure that you know what you’re getting yourself into. First, there’s the issue of preparing your content. How sure are you that you’re preparing your content the right way? Do you even know the first thing about creating search engine optimized content? Let me tell you one common mistake people do when they try to optimize the content on their own: They overly stuff it with keywords.
“Wait, isn’t that the whole point of SEO?”
No darling, it is not – not in the slightest. Keyword stuffing basically spells doom for your website; it’s what’s going to get you flagged or banned from search engine websites like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Google, especially, is very sensitive to keyword-stuffed content. When they catch the gist of what you’re trying to do, they’ll give you a fair warning the first time and ban you completely the second time. This is why it is never good to rush into things blindly. What you think will help your website might end up doing the exact opposite – and you don’t want that.
So to cut the matters short, the safest way to do SEO is to hire people who know how to do it by heart. Either that or you learn how to do it yourself, bottoms-up. If you’re really serious about learning this marketing methodology, you will get it in no time. However, know that good things always come at a price. You have to be willing to invest time and effort to learn SEO comprehensibly. If you can commit yourself to learning this skill-set in depth, then I congratulate you in advance. You’ll be able to do it. And as our way of helping, here are a few things you may want to remember when preparing your content. This is how you can make your content assistive to search engine crawlers without making it sound horribly stuffed:
Know The Right Amount Of Keywords To Use
Yes, it all starts with research. Before you begin writing content (or before you do anything at all), it is best that you uncover what you will need to have inside your content – such as the number of keywords. As a general rule, the number is likely to depend on the length of your article. The longer your article is, the higher the number of keywords you may need to include in the article. However, take note that although I say “higher,” it doesn’t mean every paragraph will have the word in it. For example, a one thousand word article is advised to have just 2% (or preferably less) keyword mentions. Stuffing your article isn’t going to help you rank. It is better to mind the quality more than the number of times you mention a certain word or phrase.
Plan Where To Mention These Keywords Effectively
Next, you also have to take the placement of these words into consideration. Where you put these words is going to affect the overall impact of your article. The usual format in SEO is that you need to place a keyword in the following sections:
1. Title or Heading
2. Subheadings
3. First Paragraph
4. Last Paragraph
These sections of the article (the intro and outro especially) have a considerable impact on crawlers and they tend to classify or index your article according to how they understand the information presented in these sections.
Use Related Information That Point To Your Keywords
While I say that stuffing your article too much will hurt your website’s standing, stuffing it with meaningful, relevant, and non-redundant information is completely okay. What do I mean by this? Instead of repeating the same anchor word over and over again, you can find other terminologies and concepts related to it and integrate them into the article. This will help crawlers understand the type of content you are trying to share to the audience which consequently leads to better indexing and classification. If you’re familiar with how the Knowledge Graph works (and you should be), you will realize how important it is to guide search engine bots during the indexation process. It will help your pages be categorized in searches they belong to.
Make Sure That You Always Bring Something New To The Table
This doesn’t just refer to your keywords but your content in general. In this day and age, the world’s information is readily accessible to man. We have insanely large databases of information that it would seem like there is no rock left in the planet left unturned. As much as possible, it is important that you try to bring something new to the world with your content. If you sound like you copied some else’s work or your article is just plain generic, it is unlikely that you’ll get ranked in the top pages of the SERPs.