Content Is King and Other Essential Elements of SEO

This is the second post in a 4-part series highlighting steps you can take to improve your website’s search engine optimization (SEO). This guide was written by Ramya Raju, an experienced freelance web design writer from India. If you’d like to visit part one, click here. 

In the first part of this step-by-step guide to search engine optimization (SEO), I covered the basics, including over-optimizing, title tags, meta descriptions and the advantages of using WordPress. Now let’s move on to other necessary elements in the quest to improve your search engine rankings and website exposure.

Other Essential Elements for SEO

Apart from adding the title tag and meta description, the following elements should also be taken care of for further search optimization.

• Internal Links – It is important that you add and share internal links to other pages of your site within the content. This helps and supports your link-building efforts in addition to the links using external sites.
• Header Tags – Search engines can gain more information regarding the content of each section with the help of the header tags. These tags usually deal with different sections that are divided on the basis of headers. The <H1></H1> tag is used for encompassing the title of the post and is always used once per page. The rest of the tags, like <H2></H2> and <H3></H3>, are used for different subheadings and can be used multiple times. Longer posts and articles can be broken down into sections that are easier to browse by both visitors and search engines.
• Image Name and ALT Tags – Images used on the website also play a key role for redirecting searches to your page via the image search options. But to have that optimized, you should use good keywords and key phrases that align with your site in the image name and ALT tag.
• Bold Text – Putting parts of text in bold ensures that the search engine and potential visitors consider it very important. But use precaution while highlighting text in this manner; overdoing it should be strictly avoided.

Related Reading: Content Creation Ideas

Content is the King

With the fast-paced world of online marketing, it is important to keep your customers on your website for as long as possible. For this reason, content plays a major role because it has the capacity to keep your visitors engaged for a longer time and also provides the search engines with rich data that helps in your website ranking.

You should explore a variety of content types that are relevant to your audience, such as blog posts, writing tutorials and guides, industry-related articles, videos, podcasts and infographics. It’s a monumental task to build a huge content database but it is doable. To begin, start with a blog post on your site and slowly move towards building content using other types of media. Feel free to share appropriate content from others (with proper attribution) to fill in the gaps while creating your own content.

Pic credit: “Content – Spraypaint Logo” by Ulysses D S is licensed under CC BY 3.0

We hope you’ve enjoyed the first two parts of this 4-part series on search engine optimization. Check back next Thursday for part 3, Link-Building to Success: Optimize Your Website. As a reminder, posts are published on the CCC  blog every Tuesday and Thursday. Thanks for stopping by!

Ramya Raju is a freelance web design writer with 8 years of extensive blogging experience on a variety of online publishing and social media platforms. She generally writes high quality articles on travel, photography, SEO, web design, English courses and other general topics as requested. Ramya, an extrovert with a passion for photography and anthropology, enjoys travelling to different countries to discover new cultures and experience life with the locals. You can reach her at ramyaraju896@gmail.com or visit her online at http://www.colorcharacter.com/uk/.