Creating quality and useful content for your readers is the most important factor that will decide your blogging career. You may be good at content marketing, but you will hardly see any growth unless there is something compelling to your readers.
Social media has emerged as the best marketing tool where your articles can go viral, bring thousands of traffic, give you loyal readers for lifetime, or increase your email subscriber lists. But none-of-these is possible without quality.
By Optimizing content, I mean the optimization for both your readers and search engines. In this post, I am gonna give a detailed description for optimizing your content. You may write an awesome article, but if its not discoverable in search engines, you are missing a good amount of traffic.
1# Create fresh and quality contents:
Give your readers something new every time they visit your blog. Update often and give importance to latest trends and news and updates regarding your niche.2# Focus on your topic:
If your are writing about traffic tips, stay focused on that topic. Provide in depth and detailed information to cover that topic. The visitors will soon leave once they find anything unrelated to the subject. You can make use of images and videos to make your subject more clear and enjoyable.You can sub-divide your contents in paragraphs under different sub heading names.
3# Avoid errors:
Give your readers an easy to understand article with no spelling or grammatical errors. You are loosing your credibility by such small errors.4# *Important* Do not write for search engine:
Optimizing your content for search engines is different from writing for search engines. Keep it in mind. Inserting various unnecessary keywords intended primarily to attain higher search engine ranking may annoy your readers. If you don’t how to use keywords in blog posts then I must recommend you to read this post: How To Add Keywords in Blog Posts For Optimization?Anchor Text to optimize your content
Anchor text are clickable texts that points to a link. The format is <a href=”#”>Your text</a>. It will simply show “Your text” pointing to the link mentioned instead of #. This text tells the users and search engines about the content you are linking.
There are two types of linking - Internal and External linking. Internal linking is pointing to a page of your own website. The main advantage of internal linking is that you keep on engaging your readers. Visitors who comes to your blog will most likely read the article and leave unless you provide something more to read. By doing internal linking, you are giving them options – options to discover more content of your blog. Moreover, Internal linking will help search engines crawlers to index your pages fast and they even help in improving search engine rankings.
With appropriate anchor text, users and search engines can easily guess what the linked page is all about.
Common practices for Anchor text linking
Choose a suitable phrase to represent an anchor text instead of a word or two.
Avoid long anchor texts
Avoid keyword stuffing
The best practice is to put the title of an article in the anchor text, since most likely you have put the best phrase in your title.
Image Optimization and importance of Alt text
Image optimization includes optimizing your images for both your readers and search engines. Google image search can bring you a lots of traffic if you optimize you images accordingly.
Read: 6 Tips To Optimize Images For SEO
Let understand what is Alt text and why it is important?Alt text is simply the alternative text that tells the search engines about the images. Search engines can’t really guess what an image is all about. They are completely blind to non-text multimedia information.
The importance of Alt text lies in the fact that if due to any reason, the image do not loads completely in the visitor’s browser, the alt text will be displayed instead of images and tells your visitors what is the image all about.
Optimizing alt text
The best practice is to put your best keywords in the alt text keeping in mind the context of images.
Provide a short descriptive text as alt text instead of a word.
If you are using your image as a link, its the Alt text that will work as Anchor text.
Read here: Add Title and Alt Attribute To Optimize Images For SEO
Final Words!
These are the basic steps towards optimizing your contents. Optimization is not limited to keyword research only. Your content includes all your text and images and its the overall optimization that will drive more traffic to your blog.
