Total Content Optimization

We all know by now that SEO is a vital part of a company’s web marketing campaign. Having a website, blog, or published articles on the web is great—but if no one can find your content in the search engines, then the material is useless. For years, optimizing a page was as easy as including your targeted keywords many times throughout the content and including them in your meta keywords tag. But now all those tactics are for the birds.

We thought it would helpful to compile a quick content optimization checklist of the fundamental methods of optimizing page content for a website. There are numerous on-page ranking factors that the major search engines take into consideration when determining how relevant a given page is for a specific search query.

While some of these factors may be more significant than others, it is important to utilize as many as possible to gain a competitive advantage in the search engines. Enjoy!

• The page content needs to be unique and present quality information that is useful for the VISITOR. Google has made it very clear that a web page should be build for visitors/actual users as opposed to search engine spiders.
• Each unique page should only target one or two primary keywords. If you are targeting more and the information you are presenting is worthy of its own page then do it! This allows you to hyper focus each page toward ranking well for specific searches.
• The page title must include the targeted keyword. Also, the closer the keyword appears towards the front of the title, the better.
• Your targeted keywords should be scattered naturally throughout the article. Do not force the keyword into your content as your ranking can actually be penalized for attempting to keyword stuff your content.
• Include variations of the targeted keyword (here at ideaLaunch we refer to them as secondary keywords) throughout the content.
• Include the targeted keywords in the url
• Use the targeted keyword in your header tags—most notably H1.
• For any image on the page, be sure to include keyword-rich alt tags
• Name your files with keywords in mind
• Use the <bold> or <strong> tag for your keywords

For more on total content optimization.