12 SEO best practices to boost your Content Marketing performance

Now that you know that SEO is really easy, we’ve compiled 12 fairly straight forward & very effective best practices to take you a step further toward optimizing the SEO reach of your content.

After all, 71.33% of all the clicks on a Google search come from the first results page.

CONTENT IS KING, CHOOSE THE RIGHT KEYWORDS AND PUBLISH AS MUCH AS YOU CAN

1. Use Google AdWords Keyword Planner to make sure you use the most popular keywords that people type in search engines in your articles. That said; don’t ignore keywords that you think are relevant to your topic just because Google’s Keyword Planner doesn’t have any data on them.

Also, look at your analytics in Google Webmaster Tools (read more here below) for the keywords that readers type to find your content.

2. Publish articles on a regular basis. The minimal frequency is at least once a week, and based on a Hubspot Benchmark Study on Blogging performance in 2014, the optimal frequency is a minimum of 6 to 8 articles a month to maximize traffic growth and sales leads.

3. The title of your articles must be as close as possible to the questions your target customers would type in Google. Don’t try to be smart, just be straight forward as if you yourself were searching for that content in Google. Of course, it would make sense to make sure you have the right keywords in the title, but keep it as “natural language” as possible.

4. Add photos to your articles. When well tagged they add keywords to your article. They also make the content more appealing on your website and when you share it on social networks such as Google+, Facebook, or LinkedIn where there usually is an image thumbnail with the title of your article.

5. Add a title to your images with keywords relevant to the article (use the Alternative Text field). Ideally the filename image of the image you upload should have these keywords too. You usually can do this when you upload your photo to your favourite content management system (CMS).

6. Link to your own blog posts within your content (just like we did in the intro of this post). Internal linking is important for Search Engines. Another good tip is to write a summary article from time to time with a list all related posts you’ve published in the past on that topic.

MAKE SURE YOUR SITE FOLLOWS TECHNICAL SEO BEST PRACTICES

7. Make sure your website is designed properly using the basic SEO best practices (H1 tag hierarchy, Search Engine Friendly URLs, Content Tags, Social Media meta, etc.). If you’re using WordPress, you have to install the WP SEO Plugin by Yoast.

Important notes: As of August 2014 having a website encrypted in HTTPS now count positively towards ranking. Starting April 2015, Google will start penalizing websites that are not optimized for mobile phones, so make sure you have a responsive design website.

8. Hook your site up to Google Webmaster Tools to see how the search engine crawls your website and make sure you don’t have any broken links or duplicate content. The Webmaster Tools will also show you the ranking of your website over time on keywords driving traffic to your site. It’s also in Webmaster Tools that you can declare your sitemap.xml file (see next point).

9. Make sure your CMS (WordPress, Tumblr, Drupal, etc.) updates your sitemap.xml files and notifies search engines as soon as you publish new content. This is a little technical and you might need some help to set it up (using mentioned here above) but this will tell Search Engines that your content is fresh and regularly updated so that they can come back add it to their indexing. Here is a Sitemap Generator plugin for WordPress that does this beautifully (and automatically) or you can also use the WP SEO Plugin by Yoast mentioned here above.

10. Make sure you have an RSS feed on your blog for other websites to syndicate and link back to your content. There still are a lot of people out there who use RSS readers and you want to make sure your RSS feed can be picked up by latest aggregation mobile Apps such as Zite, Flipboard, or Feedly.

PUBLISH & CREATE CONTENT ON SOCIAL MEDIA TO MAXIMIZE BACKLINKS

11. Share your content on as many relevant social networks as possible. This will distribute your content to these networks’ audiences, and will create more backlinks. This is more and more essential as “social signals” from users engaging with your content on social media dramatically now impacts your ranking. Note 1: make sure you leverage relevant hashtags on Twitter when sharing to extend your reach. Note 2: Google Plus still has a huge impact on SEO when your content gets a +1, don’t ignore this platform!

12. Add native content on other popular social networks such as SlideShare and Youtube or LinkedIn.
i. Start blogging on your LinkedIn profile and refer back to articles on your website. There is more and more content discovery done on LinkedIn which is now the largest publisher of business content in the world.
ii. Create an account and upload presentations to SlideShare (which now generates a keyword rich transcript of your document).
iii. Create a channel on YouTube and upload videos (the second largest Search Engine in the World and the largest social network in the US as of 2014) and insert them in your articles. Make sure you add a link back to your website and a description to these videos when you post them for keyword discovery.

The linkbacks from LinkedIn, SlideShare, and YouTube are heavy weights in generating social signals and ranking your content on search engines.