Over the years, Search Engine Optimization has evolved into the two areas that cement it as both a viable science and art form. Knowing both sides of these designations calls for knowing the basics of SEO and content marketing.
Where To Start
All content marketing starts with both the technical side of SEO and the artistic side. Some may find that using both terms are inapplicable, but they’re very wrong. One need only peruses some of the most popular sites to see fantastic designs and awesome interactive technologies. Every year the game changes with new technical skills, upgrades on old ones, new graphics and designs as well as content that dazzles the masses and keeps them coming back for more. That’s the bottom line with SEO, first, to make your site found easily among the plethora of other sites with similar content, capture that traffic for the specific keywords, key phrases, and key groups you spotlight, and then convert them into consumers who will return on a regular basis. If your site does all that, then you’re in the realm of awesome art and technology that today’s SEO offers for content marketing.
What Should Be In Your SEO Infrastructure
Since SEO is an ever changing landscape, one has to keep abreast of the latest techniques, tools, and strategies. The fundamental things like your robots tags, robots.txt, and meta robots tag. Both of these are basic technological must-haves. These inform search engine crawlers what they can and can’t do with your site and its content. Page speed is essential especially if you’ve been smart enough to optimize part of your site for the mobile market. Nothing is more frustrating than waiting for pages to load due to a crummy server or bloated webpage. An XML sitemap is also essential. It details your webpages to search engines and offers extra special data about your site for better evaluation. Quality content that is interactive, unique, and targeted is where the art comes in along with the site’s design. Don’t load sites with ten videos on a page or ridiculous copy written by some boiler room foreign writing agency. Google is penalizing sites with rotten content and that’s why proper content marketing stands on the fundamentals mentioned here.
Showing Off Your Content Marketing Skills
Once you’ve gotten your basic SEO infrastructure in place you’ll have to then populate your site with the kind of content that really gets attention. This is found in copy, pics, and video. Audio and animation too. Don’t settle for second best because if you do, it will get noticed and word will spread via social media and review sites. You’ll also get lower scores with search engines because they’re constantly gathering data about your site and if that data is a downturn you see lower ratings. Spend the extra time and money and effort to create the kind of content that will bring a higher ROI on your investment dollar. Don’t be so critical of those who create content for you, instead, encourage them to show off their skills and they’ll work from a far more comfortable position and turn out their best. Same with yourself if you’re creating content.
Design Is Everything
Your site’s design will mean success or failure. Keep designs simple but unique to your vision and niche. Don’t put every bell and trendy whistle on your pages as they’ll confuse and slow down your load speed. Your content should be spotlighted after the design focuses the surfer on your brand name and what you do. From there on your site’s design should draw attention to the areas that will lead to converting the surfer into a sale as well as long-term retention. Make your site a happy place, an informative place, a place where surfers interested in your goods and services will not only rely on but recommend to others. This is where social media comes in. Your brand name logo, the most important part of your content marketing should appear wherever you and your staff go in regard to your business. Same with videos and pics and articles on your blog. You want people to share and comment on social media which will create an explosion in targeted organic traffic, which is what you want most of all.
Conclusion
Now we can see how knowing the technical end of SEO and the artistic end can meld seamlessly if one takes the time to do the right job.