Search Engine Optimisation Training Course

Lesson No.12 - Optimising the Content

by Bruce Gow Search Engine Guy Pty Ltd
http://www.searchengine-guy.com.au

"Always write with your readers in mind". This statement is by far one of my favourite and one I abide to strongly.

Now, because you should always write with your readers in mind, doesn’t mean that you can’t do something for the search engines too, right?

This lesson is not focused on what you should do to write an article that is pleasing for your readers, but instead focuses on the small tweaks you can do to make your great post search engine friendly.

Why Should You Optimize Your Content?
You may probably have heard things like:
• On-page optimization doesn’t matter anymore; it’s all about off-page optimization.
• Google doesn’t care about keyword density anymore.
• Write for your visitors, not the search engines.

So why should you bother with optimizing your content?

There are 3 reasons why you should;

1. The value of your off-page optimization is enhanced by matching on-page optimization. For an anchor text link to be really powerful, the same keyword should exist on the destination page.

2. Google's new algorithm is based on concept relevancy, which includes synonyms and related search terms within your niche, not just the keyword itself. Unless you have those terms on page, you may fall down in the relevancy scale.

3. Write for your visitors to keep them on your pages, but don’t forget that it’s the search engines that bring you those visitors in the first place.

Content Keyword Research
The very first step before writing anything is always the same, and that’s keyword research. Go back to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, and run a search for the main topic of your post. For this example, I’m going to use “Keyword Density” again.

Again, export the results to Excel, and refine your keyword list by relevancy only, not search volume (even if a search term doesn’t have enough data for search volume, if it’s relevant, keep it in your list.)

Now, divide your keywords into 2 lists:
• Keywords with search volume.
• Keywords without search volume.

By analysing quickly the search volume of the keywords in the first list, you can come up quite easily with the following 3 categories of keywords (like we did for the page title):

• Page Concept – “keyword density”
• Main Keywords – “google keyword density” and “keyword density seo”
• Secondary Keywords – “keyword density tutorial”, “keyword density percentage”, “calculate keyword density”, “optimum keyword density” and “optimal keyword density”.

For all the keywords in the first list, strip down any duplicate word, in my example, my list looks like this:

• Keyword
• Density
• Calculate
• Google
• Optimum
• Optimal
• Tutorial
• Percentage
• SEO

Now, for each of those terms, go and research known synonyms, and add those words to the list. Here are some examples of the terms I’ve been able to add:

• research
• search
• explore
• best
• calculate
• compute
• work out
• reckon
• figure

Now, just like you did for your list, go to your second list, and strip away all duplicated words. This time, it is not necessary to research synonyms, though if you really want to do if, you can, just know that it’s not necessary at this point.
Ok, good job, this may not make sense to you yet, but it will very soon don’t worry.

Optimize Your Content Structure
Like everything, you need structure if you want results, the same goes with your content. No secret here, we are just applying what we learned in school on how to write a good essay.

Our work is to prepare an optimized framework in which we can write our quality content to please both the search engines and our readers.

Page Title
Based on the previous lesson, we already know how to write a SEO page title for our content.

Content Title
This title is the most important content you have on your page, so it must be enclosed with <h1> tags.
If you are like most of the people online, you are using your heading tags to highlight your titles and sections. This way, the font is stronger, bigger and catchier in its overall. Truly, for your visitors, there’s no doubt that this makes the overall impression of your site much neater and easier to read.

However, from a SEO point of view, heading tags are here to tell the search engine what is important on your page.

Types of Heading Tags:

1.<h1> This is what my page is the most important about.
2.<h2> This is what my page is super important about.
3.<h3> This is what my page is very important about.
4.<h4> This is what my page is important about.
5.<h5> This is what my page is relatively important about.
6.<h6> This is what my page is somewhat important about.

Most of the people don’t use them further than <h3> usually and that’s fine.

What is not fine however is when you tell the search engines that your page is super important about:

•Categories
•Recent Posts
•Archives

That’s right, on most of the sites or blogs using templates, those headers will be attributed a <h1> tags telling the search engines that this is what this page is the most important about… not so great move, right?

How You Should Use Your Heading Tags
Don’t abuse your heading tags either!

The more important a tag is, the less frequently you should use it on page, so be careful with your homepage (especially for blogs that display snippets of posts) not to end up with a dozen of <h1> tags screaming spam!

On that homepage of yours, you may want to consider decreasing them to <h2> tags instead. Not only they won’t make you look like a manipulator anymore, they won’t compete with the real <h1> of your page, but as a good <h2> will complement the value of your <h1>.

Instead of having those menu titles tagged with <h2> you could make use of the infinite possibilities of Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) used to format your site to also format your text to make it look like a <h2> tag title for your readers, but a simple text value for the search engines.

For your Categories names listed under your now “fake” <h2> Category Title, those are important keywords that should be given a <h3> or <h4> instead of being simple text.

All in all, adjust different section outside your post and on your post accordingly to give a clear summary map of what your page is all about!

Sub Title
The sub titles are the second most important element in your page content; therefore we must enclose them with <h2> tags.
Since it wasn’t possible to fit all our keywords in the Page Title or the Content Title, now is a good opportunity to insert our secondary keywords in key positions.

Introduction
Remember when I said optimization is about keyword density, keyword proximity and keyword prominence? This means that if you want your page to be highly optimized, the search engines should find a good deal of your keywords with related search term close to them, and as early as possible on the page. This is where the introduction comes in to play.  Have a look at this introduction below;

"Proper search engine optimization (SEO) requires you to research and work out the best keywords. People always try to figure out how to calculate the optimum keyword density for their pages. Although research tells that Google doesn’t care, I reckon that some of you would like to know how to calculate keyword density. In this SEO tutorial, we will explore how search engines compute keyword density percentages.”

Now, did you find anything odd about my introduction? Probably not because there’s nothing odd about it, it’s a properly written introduction.

So what is so special about it? Do you remember when we created a list of our keyword with volume, and how we researched synonyms for those keywords too?

Look closely at each word in that introduction; all my keywords and all their known synonyms are in used here!

That piece of text is not only full of keyword density about my main keywords (without obvious excess usage or keyword stuffing), with a strong keyword proximity as all the terms are very nearby one another, and highly relevant terms (use of synonyms) for latent semantic indexing (LSI) algorithm;

Since it’s the introduction, it’s placed at the top of the page which means huge keyword prominence.

Paragraphs
This is where you write your content, just do it naturally but take extra care to add all the individual words you stripped down from your second list (the one with dramatically low search volume).

Having those terms (even if they are spitted) within your content gives you a chance to appear in the search results for those keywords, and also any kind of weird long tail search.

Keep in mind that half of the searches made on the search engines are unlisted long tail search, they may not have a lot of search volume individually but there’s truly a throng of them daily, so don’t miss out on that!

Exercise
Now that you know what it takes to optimize your pages of content and the reason behind those steps, it’s now time to put them into practice.

The easiest way I found to do that is first to write your content naturally and then optimize it, this way your writing will have a more natural flow for your readers.

1.   Learn How to Sort Out the Competition
2.   Do Your Keyword Research Homework
3.   Refining Your Keywords
4.   Evaluating Ranking Difficulty
5.   Mapping Your Site Structure
6.   Understanding Links & PageRank
7.   Sculpting Your Site Structure
8.   Cascading Style Sheet Design
9.   Using Wordpress for SEO
10. Setting up Your Analytics
11. Engineering the Title Tag
12. Optimising The Content
13. Optimising The Description Tag
14. Building Internal Links
15. SEO & Images
16. OnPage Analysis Using IBP
17. Link Building 101
18. Beating Your Competition
19. Building External Links
20. Using Structured SEO

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