Get ready - Optimising Your Content for Traffic and Conversions

Here at Bulldog Digital Media, we believe that content is a major sales funnel to any kind of website. That is why we take content optimisation very seriously.

This article will delve real deep into optimising content particularly blog posts and product reviews.

What You Will Learn Today:

• What are “great content” prerequisites?
• How to do keyword optimisation
• Proper linking techniques

What Are “Great Content” Prerequisites?

This section is dedicated to teaching you how to create sexy bodies of text that your readers will sure love.

Write Unique Content

You must have heard of this a gazillion times already – write unique content! But what makes “unique content” unique? Here are some guidelines you can follow:

Don’t Copy

While it’s tempting to just copy someone else’s work and paste it on our own websites, plagiarism is a big no-no for various reasons:

• It’s unethical.
• Search engines (especially Google) will get confused which content to show. They will however show what they think is the best – and original – copy.
• It’s bad for user experience. Imagine browsing different websites only to find the same content again and again.

So what do you do?

We recommend that you only take idea of an article and use it to write another article in your OWN words. It is also better if you use more than a couple of articles as references to really make your article in-depth. Oh, and don’t forget to cite your sources or link back to their blogs. They deserve it as much as you deserve to get a link.

Shareable and Easy on the Eyes

The most probable reasons you are filling your blog with informative and entertaining articles are the following:

• You want to be recognised.
• You want to disseminate information.
• You want to increase sales.

The only way for these three to happen is when your articles get read by many.

But how? Do you ask every friend, relative, and colleague to read your article? No. You only have to add social sharing buttons in every article.

For WordPress websites, there is a plugin called Floating Social Sharing Buttons that you can easily install and configure. Other social sharing plugins have positioning options as well – you can place the buttons before or after the article. Your choice, really.

The article should be easy on the eyes too. What do I mean by this?

You may have written a 2,500-word super in-depth article that’s bound to revolutionise how your niche does something, but if it’s not properly formatted – fonts are too small, no headings, absence of rich media – it won’t matter because it will not be read. No one like a humongous wall of text.

You can easily make your article readable by doing the following:

• Use bullet points if you are listing down things like pros and cons or reasons.
• Use bold or italicised text when you want to emphasise something. These also give readers a sort of “reading direction” and break the monotony of reading plain text.
• Add images and/or videos to avoid creating a wall of text.
• Use headings and subheadings for a more organised article

Rich Media

Adding images and/or videos is recommended, not only in terms of increasing your SEO score, but in terms of user experience as well.

I also believe that featured images are inadequate; add at least 3 relevant images and a video that will complement your article.

Article Length

Quicksprout wrote an article about article length and it turns out longer is better. According to a study conducted by serpIQ, sites with a higher average content length have higher rank in serps.

It’s common sense when you really think about it. Longer content does not necessarily equate to better content, but it does have the capability to provide more value than mere 250 or 300-word articles.

So if you really want to rank for a certain keyword, write 1,500 to 2,000 word in-depth articles.

Keyword Optimisation

Keyword optimisation is essentially researching, analysing, and using the best keywords to drive traffic to your website. There is a lot involved in keyword optimisation and its scope is far beyond content only, but for this article let's stick to keyword optimisation within the article.

First off, conducting proper keyword research is necessary – you have to find not only keywords with substantial average monthly searches, but also ones with high buyer intent.

Keywords with high buyer intent drive traffic that usually converts into sales. They have the following characteristics:

• Keywords that contain “best”, “review”, or “top”
• Brand names or model numbers

You can find profitable keywords using Google Keyword Tool for free. You can refer to our previous article for more information.

There are eight parts of an article where you can optimise for your main keyword:

• Title
• Heading and Sub-heading
• Keyword Density
• Meta description
• Image file-name and Alt Tag

The point here is to include your main keyword in the title and at least once in the heading, Meta description, image file name and alt tag.

Concerning keyword density, I recommend a keyword density of around 2%, but have a look at keyword densities of sites ranking on the first page (you can use a free tool to do this). If you are website is running on WordPress, I highly recommend installing the Yoast SEO plugin. It will make your life soooo much easier.

Search engine crawlers also do not know how to read images (yet), so using alt-tags helps those crawlers understand what those images are.

KW Optimisation Pitfalls

Our intentions are good, but we sometimes become obsessive about keyword optimisation that we commit these mistakes. Of course, they do more harm than good to our websites:

Keyword Cannibalisation – This occurs when you try to target a single keyword using multiple pages. You are better off using the other pages to target different keywords.

Over-Optimisation – This occurs if you go beyond the recommended keyword density for a certain page. This may hurt your site because search engines might think you are doing something suspicious.

Lack of Keyword Focus – Quite opposite to KW cannibalisation, lack of keyword focus is targeting multiple keywords using a single page.

Linking

There are two kinds of linking I want to talk about: interlinking and outbound links.

Interlinking

Interlinking is linking to other pages within your own site. This has some advantages:

• Facilitates the flow of link juice within your site for better ranking.
• Helps visitors navigate through your site more easily.

However, you should only interlinks where it makes sense; again, too much of it will raise some red flags.

Outbound Linking

According to a Moz study, linking to other websites have a positive impact on rankings and trust, but it does have other usability benefits:

• It makes the site a more valuable and reliable resource. You are not the only knowledge hub on your industry. Linking out to relevant sources, especially on authoritative ones will boost your online credibility.
• It encourages engagement and contribution. When you link out to people, chances are they will actively contribute to your site in a number of ways. This could be through insightful commenting or even guest post opportunities if you are lucky.

Conclusion

Optimising your content isn’t rocket science – these tips will surely help boost your rankings and increase traffic.

Here at Bulldog Digital Media, we optimise websites to give the best ROI. Interested in how we can help YOU? Shoot me an email.

Andre
[email protected]