Understanding SEO Content

Understanding SEO content is important if you’d like to make changes to your website. Without this knowledge, changes could be detrimental to your search engine optimisation.

Let’s say you have a page on your website, which you’d like people to find in the search engines. The first thing to consider, is what phrase would you expect someone to enter into the search engine. There’s a good chance that you’re considering a few phrases. It’s often best to use a keyword research tool, to find the phrase that people are searching for the most.

Once you’ve decided on the main key phrase that your web page will target, there are some requirements to meet. There are quite a lot of requirements, so they’ve been broken up into Essential Requirements and Further Requirements, as outlined below.

Understanding SEO Content Essential Requirements

• It’s important not to target the same key phrase on a different page within your website, as you don’t want to be competing against yourself.
• Your web page should have an SEO Title, which is the main text in the result returned by a search engine. KWD IT use the Yoast SEO plugin, which allows you to set this just below your content. The SEO Title needs to contain your key phrase.
• Your SEO Title should be between 50 and 70 characters. The SEO Title width is important to Google, so depending on the characters used, the ideal character count would change.
• The length of your key phrase is also important. Based on the fact your SEO Title shouldn’t exceed 70 characters and needs to contain your key phrase, this is also a sensible character limit for your key phrase.
• Your web page should have a Meta Description, which is the smaller text you’ll see in each result returned by a search engine. KWD IT use the Yoast SEO plugin, which allows you to set this just below your content. The Meta Description needs to contain your key phrase.
• Your Meta Description length needs to be around 155 characters long. You can often use the first paragraph of your content and cut it short if need be.
• The URL of your page should contain your targeted key phrase. It’s best to keep your URL as short as possible and avoid using dates, as this will cause problems when keeping the content updated.
• The first paragraph of content on your web page should include your key phrase. Ideally, as close to the beginning as possible.
• Your content should contain at least 300 words for the search engines to be able to understand your topic. Three SEO institutions have concluded that between 1,000 and 1,900 words is the recommended word count for the highest rankings.
• Your content should contain your key phrase a certain amount of times. The amount of times depends on the amount of content. The density should be somewhere between 0.5 and 3%.

Understanding SEO Content Further Requirements

• Depending on the length of your content, it’s important to break things up with sub-headings, making it easier to read. These sub headings should also include your key phrase.
• Your content should include at least one image.
• The alt text for the images that you add, should include your key phrase.
• Your content should contain at least one link to a page within your own website, providing additional information to the content on your page.
• Your content should contain at least one link to a third-party website, providing additional information to the content on your page.

Summary

If you’re adding your own content, you should try and meet these requirements. If you’ve paid an SEO specialist to meet these requirements for you, you should be very careful who you give access to edit your content. The slightest change can undo hours of hard work and really damage your search engine rankings. Take a look at KWD IT’s WordPress Search Engine Marketing page, for our available packages and consider letting the experts manage your content.