How to Write Website Content
for Top SEO Rankings

Top search engine rankings through SEO optimized web page content is explained here in detail. Top rankings are achieved through both on-site SEO optimized content and off-site backlinking practices.  If you drop the ball on either then you will not get the results you want – which are rankings in the 1 – 3 positions of the search engine results pages (SERP).

Keyword Analysis

Before beginning writing content you need to ensure you get the best SEO value out of a pages content. To ensure this start with keyword analysis. This will tell you what kind of traffic to expect when your rankings come in. The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is a great free tool that gives you number of monthly searches and more. Nothing like getting it straight from the horses mouth.

Latent Semantic Indexing – LSI

Once you have your list of targeted keywords you need to determine what keywords will be used on any particular page. Select no more than a few primary keywords for a page or blog post. Next you’ll need a list of keywords or keyword phrases that are contextually relevant to these keywords. This is due to the Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) attribute of current search engine algorithms. If you have a keyword density for your selected keywords and there are no other keywords that would fit into a normal conversation on the same topic then you will not get the best results. A good tool to find semantically related words is the Google Wonder Wheel.  Just do a regular Google search then click the left-side Google Wonder Wheel link.

Page URL (Address)

When you create your page make sure you use the most important keywords in a natural way that doesn’t look like obvious keyword stuffing. In WordPress this is the Permalink. Here is an example of a URL that uses keywords effectively: http://www.21stsoft.com/denver-seo-company/.

SEO Optimize Body Content

Write the main body content first with keywords from the keyword analysis above.  Details of factors to consider and places to put your content are described below.

Solve a Customer Problem

If your content is valuable to others because it solves their problems then you can expect more interest. Content that focuses on only you and your company tends to get lower interest. Blog posts in particular should be focused on problem solving or providing illuminating information. An example would be timely information regarding industry breaking news like Apples press conference about iPhone 4 problems.

Write for the Internet User

Internet users are reluctant to read long passages of text. Limiting your paragraphs to 4 or 5 lines and bulleting out your main points increase the probability of your visitors reading what you write.

Keyword Prominence

A keywords prominence refers to where the keyword appears within a particular section of a page.  In general, to show importance you should place your targeted keywords at the beginning of the main body content, title tag, description meta-tag, keywords meta-tag, etc.

Optimized Keyword Density

Keyword densities of 2 – 4% along with proper LSI content will get you top rankings. You can use this tool to test for your keyword densities: http://www.gorank.com/analyze.php

Keywords At Top and Bottom

Make sure to start your body content with keywords, and end them with the same targeted keywords. This tells the search engines your intent that these keywords are important.

Anchor Link Text

A very important ranking factor is the placement of text links on your pages and blog posts. Make sure to use keywords in the anchor text, use a full URL (http://www.21stsoft.com/web-development-blog/) instead of a relative link (about-us.php), and lastly make sure that the target page for the link points to a relevant page all about the keywords in the anchor text. For example, here is our search engine optimization (SEO) page.

Header (h1, h2…) Tags

Using a proper hierarchy of header tags starting with your important keywords is another important attribute used in ranking algorithms.

Keyword Bolding and Italics (Emphasis)

As you can see from this article, the important keywords are in bold and italics. This separates those words and signals importance to the search engines. Note that underlining text that is not a link is a usability problem because Internet readers expect links to be underlined.

Image Alt Tags

The image alt attribute is important for both SEO and accessibility – for visitors with disabilities that use readers to scan and read web page content for them. Make good use of these tags and make them both descriptive and keyword oriented for the search engines.

SEO Optimize Page Titles

The page title between the <title>Your Title Here</title> tags is what shows up in search engines as the link. As such, if the keywords that were typed in for the search are in this link then the user sees that link as relevant. You want it to be 65 characters or less, to start with keywords and persuasive to draw a click.

SEO Optimize Meta-Description

The description meta tag <meta name=”description” content=”Your description here.” /> should be 150 characters or less. This is the amount of text shown in the descriptive part of the SERP under the title link. if the search engine finds the keywords used in the search on the page then they’ll show an excerpt of the page content. If the keywords are not found on the page then the search engine will show the meta-description information. For this reason you want to make it persuasive and about the page content so it will draw a click and when the visitor arrives the content will be about what they searched for.

About the Author

Michael Cordova writes about technology and builds WordPress SEO websites. He has been doing search engine optimization since the beginning of the Internet. BEFORE YOU GO call Michael at (303) 744-2178 for a free initial SEO website evaluation or contact him from the links above.

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Tags: Backlinks, Keyword Analysis, LSI, Search Engines, SEO, SERP, Tools

This entry was posted on Friday, July 16th, 2010 at 10:08 am and is filed under Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.