In the world of SEO, everyone has an opinion. What’s more, they’re likely to publish it. The SEO community flourishes with advice, but the problem is that often the smaller things get overlooked. A little digging can reveal some good basic how-to articles, but it is a shame when regular bloggers don’t take the time to set out the basics of search engine optimisation- particularly as the basics of SEO are so important.

One thing that rarely is discussed is the basic things that can be done to smooth the way for your SEO. Many businesses consult a professional for their site’s optimisation, and you can talk to us at SEO Consult if you are considering professional optimisation. Even when you’re planning to get professionals on board, there are things you will need to do to ensure that your SEO keeps running smoothly. Content is one of the areas in which you will need to continue your SEO plan over a long period of time.

Content is an extremely important factor in SEO. Fresh content attracts frequent crawling by the search engines and improves your chances of climbing through the rankings. While it can be a good idea to consult a professional when it comes to content provision, there are things you can do to the content itself when it is posted to ensure it works as hard as it can for your site’s ranking.

Consider these key points:

• Keyword positioning. Keywords should have a prominent place in titles and subheadings, being placed as far to the left as possible. Sometimes, it is worth editing a piece of content so that your keywords are in the most prominent place. Don’t fall into the trap of placing your keywords first in every title, however. This gets boring and risks the content being filtered for keyword stuffing

• Highlight keywords. Highlighting keywords in either bold, italics, colour or using hypertext to anchor them for links will attract the eyes of the user reading your content and let search engines know that the keyword is important. Many businesses make the mistake of highlighting every keyword within their content, and the result looks spammy to both search engines and users

• Use subheadings. These are great both in SEO terms and in site usability. Human users scan content because their time on your site is limited. Subheadings help users to find the information they need. A good subheading can be the difference between a user pausing to absorb your message and a user clicking back to the SERPs. Subheadings are also a great opportunity to give your keywords further prominence for search engine spiders. Don’t forget to include your subheadings in the header code of your pages

• Keep it interesting. Although the search engines may be the driving force of your content plan, your site’s users are the ultimate audience for all of your content. Quality content will see your users returning regularly to your site, and perhaps even generate some inbound links. It’s worthwhile spending a little time and resources on quality

Get Involved