Teach Yourself VISUALLY Search Engine Optimization (2013)

Chapter 7. Working with Content

Your website’s content is the most important part of your site and what your visitors seek when they come to your website via its URL, or via a search engine. Therefore, it is the first element that you need to optimize in your SEO process. Although you need to optimize the content so it’s easily recognizable to search engine crawlers, it should also be unique and professional.

Build Optimized Content

Check Duplicated Content

Compare Website Content

Check Content Grammar and Spelling

Check Keyword Density

Create a RSS Feed with FeedBurner

Create a Feed Subscription Form

Work with Professional Writing Services

Build Optimized Content

Content is the main part of your website and it is the main factor that search engines use to rank and index your website. Even if you spend time and effort to optimize bad content, original, high-quality content will receive more traffic and be indexed by search engines much more easily. Having good content, however, does not mean that you need to forgo website optimization; the SEO process helps your content appear in the top of the search engine results page. Before you add your content, you should consider writing factors and how you will produce good content.

Provide Useful and Professional Content

When you write content for a website, you have to make sure that the content is unique and useful for your readers. Search engines reward high-quality content with higher ranking and better placement in search engine results. If your content is not good enough, it will eventually be buried in the search results page, as the search engine places better quality content above it.

Use Attractive and Representative Heading Titles

The first part of the content that your website visitor sees is the header. It is also the first part that the search engine checks when it begins to index your website. When you choose the content title, it should represent the topic discussed in the content. Additionally, the title should compel the user to click on your site and read through the content. A good title has to contain the most important keywords that you focus on in your article or post.

Write for Your Reader

Most website owners seeking better SEO positions make the terrible mistake of losing sight of their target, and, in turn, their readers’ interest. When they lose their readers, they subsequently slip in the website rankings and lose website traffic. It is important to target your readers with topics that interest them and to use professional, high-quality content. Your topics should include the keywords that you expect the user to use to find your content from search engines.

Drive Readers to Interact

When you build your website and add content, you have to consider the interaction with your readers, which is known as the call-for-action process. In this process, you try to add functions that help users interact with the website and the team behind it, such as providing a comments section, options for contacting you, and poll questions. You can drive readers to interact with your website by asking them to share their experience with products and opinions about topics. This relationship builds a strong connection between your visitors and the website, helping you get more exposure in your website’s market.

Use a Personal Voice When Possible

With some types of websites, such as blogs and personal sites, readers seek a personal experience with an expert and would like to hear the expert’s opinions about specific topics. For example, you can visit an expert SEO blog to learn about his or her experience with special problems or tips to improve your website indexing. A personal voice can help get the reader’s attention because it represents friendly advice for someone in a similar position as the reader.

Check Duplicated Content

It is incredibly important to make sure your website content is not duplicated anywhere else on the web. Duplicated content can weaken your website and search engines may penalize it. Penalization can vary from reducing your website’s rank to removing it from the search engine results page. Duplicated content happens when you copy others’ content or other websites copy yours. While you do not have much control over the latter, the former is important because you do not want it to appear to search engines that your copied others’ archived content. The process of copying content is called plagiarism.

Check Duplicated Content

Type www.copyscape.com in your web browser and press .

The Copyscape website appears.

Type the URL that you would like to check for plagiarism.

Click Go.

The similar results appear.

Click one of the results.

A The preview page appears with the copied text highlighted.

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Are there any other plagiarism checkers?

Many free tools can help you to check website content for plagiarism and make sure that the content you add in your website is unique. You can use the Plagiarism Checker (www.dustball.com/cs/plagiarism.checker) to check copied versions of text, website content, and students’ papers. Another option is Plagiarism Detect (http://plagiarism-detect.com/), a service that allows you to check the possible duplication of website links and text by uploading text files. Yet another is PlagTracker (www.plagtracker.com), which supports different languages and provides a comprehensive plagiarism checking process.

Compare Website Content

While duplicate content websites check specific links or content and compare them with the rest of the content on the Internet, Compare tools, such as Copyscape (www.copyscape.com/compare.php), help you identify similarities between two specific links or sections of text. You can use this tool if you know exact sections of website content that may have been copied from your site and you need to confirm it is identical without reading all the text on the website. This tool provides a match percentage for both sources and shows the similar keywords.

Compare Website Content

Type www.copyscape.com/plagiarism.php in your web browser and press .

The plagiarism page appears.

Position your mouse pointer over Products.

Click Free Content Comparison.

The Compare page appears.

Type or paste the first section of text in the Item 1 field.

Type or paste the second section of text in the Item 2 field.

Click Compare Items.

A The comparison results appear.

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Are there any other compare tools?

You can use other tools to compare text, links, and HTML code to make sure that your website content is unique and it has not been copied from other places. DiffNow (www.diffnow.com) allows you to compare text and HTML code. Simply enter two website links, and DiffNow shows you the difference between the HTML code for both links. At www.comparemyfiles.com, you upload text files and compare them. In addition, you can find simpler tools at www.tareeinternet.com/scripts/comparison-tool, www.quickdiff.com, and www.diffchecker.com. Using compare tools is an important part of checking your website content’s quality and originality before publishing it on your website.

Check Content Grammar and Spelling

If you are creating content for your website, you have to make sure that the content is free of grammar and spelling mistakes. These errors give your readers the impression that your website is not professional and they will leave it without the chance of returning again. From the search engine point of view, content with grammatical errors and typos may negatively impact your website ranking because your content does not appear to be high-quality content. Many online free tools, such as www.spellcheck.net, are available to help you check your website for typos and grammatical errors.

Check Content Grammar and Spelling

Type www.spellcheck.net in your web browser and press .

The Spell Check form appears.

Type your text, or copy and paste it.

Click Spell Check.

The Spell Checker window appears with the spelling check results.

Click Grammar.

The grammar errors appear underlined.

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What other professional language editors can I use?

You can use a word processing application such as Microsoft Word or Apple Pages as a basic editor while you are writing your content. However, other applications, such as WhiteSmoke (www.whitesmoke.com), provide more comprehensive content editing tools. WhiteSmoke focuses on proofreading your content and provides statistics and evaluations for it. You can use it as a guide for proofreading your content, but it does not eliminate the need to do your own professional review.

Check Keyword Density

Search engine spiders index your content based on keywords that match the search query and website category. Given this, it is important to make sure the density of keywords in your website content meets the minimum, and does not exceed the maximum, amount required by the search engine. Tools to check different keywords in your content and its density are available. The Keyword Density Analysis Tool (www.internetmarketingninjas.com/seo-tools/keyword-density) is free; simply submit the content link and it searches different types of keywords.

Check Keyword Density

Type www.internetmarketingninjas.com/seo-tools/keyword-density in your web browser and press .

The Keyword Density Analysis tool appears.

Type the website link.

Click Ninja Check.

The content keyword results appear.

Click Show/Hide.

More keywords are revealed.

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Are there other free keyword tools?

Yes, you can use other similar tools to check the keywords in your content, such as the SEO Book Keyword Density Analyzer tool at http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density. With this tool, you can submit your website and get the number of repeating keywords and their density ratios within the entire content.

How do I add the keywords in the content naturally?

Make sure the keywords in your content flow naturally without affecting the quality of your content or annoying your website visitors while they are reading the article. Keeping your focus on high-quality content will help you achieve a high ranking in the search engine.

Create a RSS Feed with FeedBurner

The RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed is a XML version of your website content and it is used by feed grabbers to get updates from your website. Creating the RSS feed is part of optimizing content because it makes it available to different web technologies, such as feed aggregators and news feeds. One of the comprehensive tools that allows you to create XML feed is Google’s FeedBurner. It enables you to create feed for your website and generate a form your website users can use to join the feed and get updates about your new content directly via e-mail.

Create a RSS Feed with FeedBurner

Type http://feedburner.google.com/ in your web browser and press .

Type your e-mail address.

Type your password.

Click Sign in.

Note: You can create a new account if you do not already have one.

The FeedBurner home page appears.

Type the link for the website.

Click Next.

The next page appears.

Type the feed title.

Type the feed address.

Click Next.

The Feed is created.

Click the Skip directly to feed management link to go to feed dashboard.

You can use the dashboard links to setup the feed and customize it.

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How do I choose the best feed name and URL?

The feed name should represent your website and when users visit the feed directly from their web browsers or feed applications, they should see the name is the same as your website or reflects it. The feed URL is the link that users use to subscribe to your updates, either through their browsers or the feed applications that display site feeds directly on their computers or mobile devices. The URL should be easy to remember and reflect the website’s content.

Create a Feed Subscription Form

In addition to using the feed link, users can subscribe to your feed through a subscription form on your website. The form lets users add their e-mails and get frequent updates about your website’s new content directly in e-mails. A growing number of subscribers is a good indicator that your website is gaining readers who follow its updates frequently. You can invite website readers to subscribe to the website feed to get updates. This can help increase your number of subscribers.

Create a Feed Subscription Form

Type http://feedburner.google.com/ in your web browser and press .

Type your e-mail address.

Type your password.

Click Sign in.

The FeedBurner home page appears.

Click the feed title.

The Feed dashboard appears.

Click the Publicize tab.

The Publicize tab home page appears.

Click Email Subscriptions.

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What are the RSS feed readers?

The RSS feed readers are tools that users can add to their favorite feed sites to grab website updates frequently. Some feed readers are online-based, such as www.google.com/reader, www.bloglines.com, and www.netvibes.com, which others are desktop-based such as Netnewswirewww.netnewswireapp.com.

What is the PingShot service?

The PingShot service is an option in the FeedBurner dashboard that you can reach from the Publicize tab. After you activate this feature, PingShot starts to publish your website feed through other feed resources. You can use this feature to help spread the word about your feed updates to different feed readers.

You can customize the RSS feed subscription form by editing the code that FeedBurner provides. This customization can make the form compatible with your website design. Also, you can manage subscribers from Subscription Management, where you can view the subscribers’ e-mail addresses and export them in an Excel Spreadsheet Comma Separate Value (CSV) format. You can customize the feed update e-mail through Email Branding, in the left menu. This option helps you customize the update e-mail title, logo image, and style format.

The Email Subscriptions section appears.

Click Activate.

The Subscription Management page appears.

Scroll down the page.

The Subscription Management settings appear.

Click the Send me an email whenever people unsubscribe option ( changes to ).

Click Save.

The feed customization settings are saved.

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How do I promote the feed through Twitter?

You can tweet updates about your content to your social account on Twitter by selecting the Socialize option under the Publicize tab. When you activate this option, FeedBurner automatically publishes the feed updates to your Twitter account. You have an option to set up how the tweet message displays.

How do I show the feed count on my website?

Showing the feed count for your website often drives new visitors to join it. This feed count is a small count script that grabs the number of your feed subscribers from the FeedBurner account. You can activate the Feed Count and customize its settings under the Publicize tab.

Work with Professional Writing Services

Quality content is the most important part of your website. Not all website owners can write strong content for their sites. Given this, professional writing services that deliver website articles and content are available. With these websites, you submit a request for content about a specific topic and one of the website authors writes it for you based on your needs and requirements. Many of these sites provide templates that you can choose from, such as ones for product reviews, press releases, and lists. MediaPiston (www.mediapiston.com) is an example of one of these websites.

Work with Professional Writing Services

Type www.mediapiston.com in your browser and press .

Click Account Sign in.

The Sign-in or create an account page appears.

Click Odesk to create an account using the www.odesk.com website.

Note: You need to create an account on www.odesk.com to hire a writer on MediaPiston.

The MediaPiston home page appears.

Click Create Order.

Fill in the Create a new Order form.

Click Continue to review your order and place it.

After your order is placed, one of the site authors will start writing the article for you.

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What are article templates?

You can choose among different templates with your article order. These templates include SEO articles, travel articles, and blog posts. You can also request marketing documents, such as product reviews, press releases, and social media posts.

How do I choose the article’s length?

The length of the article should be suitable for your website audiences. For example, many blog posts stick to short articles or the audience loses interest in the topic. Alternatively, some websites require longer, more in-depth articles to earn high rankings in the search engines.