SEO Best Practices When Developing New Content

Content is the foundation of every website. You can’t do SEO if you have no content. That is why small websites, with just 10 or 20 pages have a hard time drawing traffic: there are thousands of other topic-related websites that publish new content every day.

So, if you’re not willing to think very seriously about developing new content, that is SEO friendly and that offers quality information to your readers there are others that we’ll do it and get your potential clients.

Here are 12 of some SEO best practices to think about, when you plan new content:

1. Think in groups. This is not only a battle of quality but also of quantity. Only one article can’t get you too much traffic by its own. Articles that target high competitive keywords must be supported by related content that targets derived long tail keywords.
2. Watch for rising trends in news. This is really big because when a news reaches a high volume of articles, searches, lots of tweets and so on, Google will enable their QDF (Query Deserves Freshness) ranking algorithm that is different from the classic ranking algorithm basically because it favorites fresh content that speaks about the rising news.
3. Have small lists of targeted keywords. Each group of articles that you’re planning should have a small list of related keywords behind it. This list will contain the main, high competitive keyword and derived/related keywords. This step is necessary, in order to develop articles that target keywords with at least few monthly searches. Many words can be related to your topic but it’s important to choose the ones that are being searched.
4. Think seriously about long tail keywords. Long tail keywords play a crucial role. The reason is because ranking for long tail keywords depends more on how well optimized your content is rather than external factors. All the good rankings on long tail keywords will improve the exposure of the article that targets the high competitive keyword and will also flow some link-authority to it.
5. Plan how you’ll link between your articles. Internal linking is extremely important not only for SEO but for improving user experience also. Because articles that target long tail keywords rank easier it’s more probably to attract incoming links. If then you link from these articles to the one that targets a more competitive term then some of the link-juice will also flow to that article.
6. Plan your titles. Titles are the most important factor of users clicking your articles. In terms of SEO, I think that titles play one of lead roles. A good title will contain your keywords for that article but also will have something that will trigger the curiosity or interest of readers.
7. Make sure you’re being crawled and indexed. Make sure you don’t have metatags with noindex that will block search engines from indexing your content.
8. Plan how you’ll spread the content. The Internet is like a big playground and if you want others to see “your new toy” you’ll have to go where the big attractions are. This means that you’ll have to identify what social networks host discussions or bookmarkings on related topics.
9. Don’t link externally with your keywords. The reason for this is because by doing so you’ll flow trust and relevancy to your competition.
10. Link internally in a natural way. Internal links should be made in a natural way. This means to have descriptive anchor text (not click here… kind of link) placed inside sentences. Don’t abuse of this and link all your pages to your main page: it will get you penalized. Also, don’t link internally with the same keyword: diversify, use singular or plurals, synonyms, related terms. Very important is to link between topic-related pages: this way you’ll maximize your SEO efforts. Be aware that more links to the same page from the same article will be considered by search engines as one: but use them to improve user functionality.
11. Users and search engines should see the same version of your content. Don’t try to cloak your pages and present different versions of your page to users and search engines. It will get you penalized.
12. Don’t stuff the footer or end of article with lots of links. Placing lots of links in the footer of your website or at the end of your article and thinking that this will improve your SEO and user interactivity is wrong. People will find it strange and will not even bother reading all your links and search engines will not assign any relevancy to those links. Links are meant to be clicked when reason asks for it. Use your links in a logical way to offer more interesting information and you’ll get clicks from your readers.

Let me know if you have something to add. Also, if you find this article useful please consider subscribing to my blog.