When you invest in producing a high-quality piece of content, it only makes sense that you want it to be seen by as many people as possible.

How can you help make that happen? Make sure each piece of content has a target Keyword, and that keyword is placed in the right spot both on-page (headings, body content) and off-page (page titles, meta descriptions, alt text).

Here are more tips, tricks, and tools on how to increase SEO and drive traffic to your site.

“When I write for my clients, I’m focused on nailing the right tone for the brand and making sure the project’s objectives are met. Remember — your reader is a human, not an SEO-bot, so you need to make sure you’ve written something they want to read.

That doesn’t mean you can ignore your Keywords, though — without them, you’ll get lost in the digital ocean. You just have to weave them into your copy in a way that’s still pleasant to read.

First, do your keyword research. Google’s Keyword Planner tool is free and widely used.

Next, write with your desired keywords in mind, but don’t treat them as gospel YET. Write until you’ve got an easy-to-read first draft. (You can use the free Hemingway tool to make sure you’re writing at a level that’s easy for your reader to understand.)

Here comes the magic — are you ready for this? Read your copy out loud. If it sounds awkward when you say it, it will FEEL awkward when your intended reader sees it. Reword things to smooth out any rough bits.

After that, go back and massage the complete keyword in. For example, if your keyword is “dog training ideas” and your initial sentence was, “Here are some tips for training your new pup,” that becomes, “Got a new pup? Here are some dog training ideas that will get you started.” See how easy that was?

Finally, use a tool like Webtexttool to make sure you’ve worked your most important keywords in enough times to count. This tool is not free, but getting your SEO-rich content right the first time? Priceless.”

– Misha Hettie, Uncommonly Good Biz

“If you want your content to rank high in SERPs, then you have to take a long journey, which starts with keyword research. Most bloggers and companies fail to discover the enormous marketing potential of their content, and this is because they omit this very important step.

The first thing I do before I create content is to find the most valuable “high-volume” keywords and check the existing competition. Then, I filter those keywords and conclude which is the most appropriate.

I usually write long-form content, which means more than 1000 words in a blog post. Using keywords throughout my post is the second step. Certain places have the most impact on users and search engine crawlers that index your site, including the Page Title, Headings, and Anchor Texts.

Link-building is the third step. Google still loves incoming links as an indispensable part of any SEO strategy. You have to share your content with trustful sources and make partnerships with high-authority blogs. Make sure you check your backlinks often to make sure they’re coming from high-value sites.

A few quick final tips: 1) Always follow the latest SEO best practices, 2) Don’t even think about black-hat SEO or creating poor content, 3) Optimize your images with keywords as well as your text, and 4) Don’t forget to check your page speed.”

– Stavros Theodoratos, Founder & Content Manager, GrowDigital

“Positioning content in Search Engines takes time. It will take months if you do everything right, but if you do it wrong, it may take years to recover. Follow the rules to write quality content and do not try to take shortcuts because search engines will catch you (and they’re relentless).

Define the types of visitors you want to attract and identify what they search for on the internet. Do not focus on concrete words but concepts or actions. The most obvious words are probably positioned in other articles, so use tools to measure the interest and competence of your chosen concepts in search engines.

Choose them carefully and be aware of your possibilities. Then, write a few of good-quality articles and complete them with more articles that add value. Search engines know how to detect that value, and they appreciate it and reward it.

However, all this only works if it is constantly done. SEO rewards two things above all: the quality of the content and constancy. Better to be uploading a few good articles a month than to upload a lot of information at once.

Finally, work on SEO like any other project in your company. Design a medium- or long-term strategy. Identify objectives, plan regular content, allocate resources and make periodic revisions to readjust your strategy.

Learn, plan, be constant, and be consistent. It’s that ‘easy.'”

– Richard Balet, CEO and Founder, Sinnaps

“Keyword research is maybe one of the most important parts of improving search engine ranking; however, it’s also one of the most neglected ones. Here’s how you should be looking at your keyword planning to get better results.

Search engines evolve constantly, and the latest updates changed the rules of the game and how you should be looking to your SEO planning. You’ll need to use both long-tail keywords to build “pillar pages” and short-tail keywords (and variations of it) to build “clusters pages.”

On the pillar page, you’ll summarize what the concept means (long-tail keyword) and link all of your other content to it. On the clusters page, you’ll produce your content and link it directly to the pillar page related to it.

Here’s an example: My pillar page could be one that answers the question “What is a Content Marketing Platform?” (long tail).

My clusters pages would be blog posts talking about the following topics: workflow management, editorial calendar management, keywords management, content production management, content planning, content distribution, content optimization, and content marketing management (short tail).

– Pedro Clivati, contenttools.com

“Writing keyword-rich content is an important step in getting your content discovered. Without search engines being able to find your content, your targets users won’t see it. Here are six things you can do to increase SEO:

1.      Pick a keyword or keyword phrase to focus on and use it in your headline, title tag, H1 tag, and meta description.

2.      Write your content naturally.

3.      Once done, go to Google and type your focus keyword.

4.      Scroll to the bottom of the search result page and look at the related keywords suggested by Google.

5.      Pick 3-4 phrases from the list Google has suggested.

6.      Go back to your content and replace your focus keyword anywhere in the body of the content with one of these phrases, except in the title tag, H1 tag, first paragraph, last sentence or paragraph.

Most importantly, focus on the type of content your user will love — this is what Google really wants.”

– Adegboye Adeniyi, Head of SEO, VTNS Solutions

p.s. Ready to produce content? Find more tips about sourcing visuals for your website and blog.

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