What is SEO and how SEO is related to content marketing?

SEO and content marketing

Search engine optimization is the process of modifying and optimizing your web pages and content to make it easily discoverable by the audience.

SEO is one of the most important tools for content marketers because when you optimize your content, you are making it visible to a larger audience. Your website will be visible to people who search for a keyword term related to your service or product.

Search engine optimization also explains how one can make their content accessible for “crawlers”, i.e. the search engine indexing software, to scan and index your website. Nonetheless, SEO is a constantly evolving field. Almost everything keeps changing about it, but one thing remains common, the importance of quality content.

Essentially, content and SEO are very much interconnected as most people use search engines to look up for their questions, tutorials, products and services for finding relevant answers. The top search result might be an article, a video or some kind of product description.

It includes all kinds of content. We can say that content and SEO are totally interrelated, and it is a bit tough to make sense of the nuances they relate.

If we put it simply, one needs to have quality content for the success of your search engine optimization. The content needs to be original and high quality, and that itself will be the foundation of your SEO.

Content marketing is a tricky area and one cannot do without doing both, producing quality content and showcasing it to a proper audience. One needs to be an expert at both, putting out quality content and that too, in the most SEO-friendly manner.

The Difference Between SEO and Content Marketing

Speaking of the differences, SEO is a technical aspect of marketing where you have to emphasize more on the structure and design of your website. You need to optimize your content to make it more user-friendly by using relevant terms, building high-quality links and optimizing metadata. This will make your pageRank higher in search engines.

Whereas, if we speak of content marketing, it involves posting relevant content on your blog, website, and social media accounts to target a proper audience. It involves attracting and retaining the audience to create an interest in your products and services in them.

However, there is some overlapping point between these two things:

  1. Optimization of your content for popular search engines helps it rank higher. That will help you achieve your content marketing goals.
  2. Posting high-quality content will make your website more relevant, and hence will increase its possibility to rank higher.

How to optimize your content?

Search engine optimization is tricky as we mentioned before, and to be precise, it is all about relevance and intent. You need to be on your toes if you want to keep your content optimized according to the search engine algorithms.

However, there are some tips that could help you. Read on!

Use the keywords wisely:

Focus on search engine optimization keywords
Focus on search engine optimization keywords

Though keywords play a significant role in SEO, stuffing them in your content is not advisable. Think before you add keywords. Here are some tips for the same:

  1. Include primary keywords in the title, headings, and subheadings of your content. This is important for making your content more relevant to the client. Although the use of keyword phrases in your title makes it less exciting, it will attract the audience to read your content.
  2. Use the keywords in a way that they make the content exciting. Please do not use them unnecessarily for the sake of including them in your content.

Use headings properly:

Headings serve as the navigation map for your content, especially when you write a long-form content. They are essential elements of good SEO that are often overlooked while creating and publishing content.

The HTML tags for headers range from H1 to H6. This helps create an outline and provide structure to the content. Some of the best practices for using header tags are:

  1. Use the H1 tag to represent the title of page
  2. Use H2 tags to describe the chapter list or list of main topics that you will cover on page
  3. Use H3-H6 tags in additional sub-headings

Adding better quality links makes your SEO strategies stronger. Why is this aspect important?

  1. Google, or any other search engine, can estimate the relevance of content on your page.
  2. When the content is supported by high-quality links as the proof for its words, it indicates to the search engine that the content is highly relevant to the audience queries.

Identify the difference between good quality links and bad quality links. Optimize your website following the standards of generating better quality links to develop a strong link profile on any search engine.

Add a strong and appropriate meta description:

When you search for something in your browser, you may see a small portion of data under the SERP title. The purpose of that description is to represent the content on the page. It is known as meta-description.

A reader makes the choice of selecting your content based on this description. Hence, meta-description is an essential ingredient of your SEO plate. Consider the following things while creating this small description:

  1. The maximum length of the description should not exceed 300 characters (including space)
  2. Be extremely precise while designing this short description as it gives an idea about your actual content to the reader
  3. Do not forget to use a long-tail keyword in this description as it has a high significance concerning SEO

Search engines keep on changing their algorithms frequently. Thus, creating meta-descriptions for your contents in a monotonous way won’t work. You need to optimize your content along with the meta-description regularly with a target of making it reader-friendly as well as SEO-friendly.

Content optimization for mobile phones:

Mobile-friendly website responsiveness
Make sure your website is mobile-friendly.

Many surveys worldwide prove that nowadays, maximum and organic search queries are raised through mobile phones rather than desktops and laptops. In this scenario, it is crucial to make your website mobile-friendly. Make sure that every content on your website passes through optimization before launching it to search engines.

Here are some tips to make mobile-friendly contents:

  1. Make sure that the website is responsive to mobile phones.
  2. Do not go for different links for different platforms. Preferably use the same link that a user can access both on desktops as well as mobile phones.

Optimize the length of your posts:

Search engines like Google are more inclined towards long articles. In fact, the average word count of a first page search on Google is seen to be about 2000 words. It is not necessary to make your post that long every time, but it will be better if you do so.

You can even use subtitles and break up your posts into smaller parts to make it user friendly. Also, make sure you subscribe to Google’s blog to get some insight into what people are searching for now and then.

Final words

Improve the ranking of your content on any search engine through the tips mentioned above. It is a fact that search engines change their algorithms frequently, but nothing can beat a relevant, easily accessible, and reader-friendly content.

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