SEO for Content Marketing 101

Let’s start with what is SEO. SEO focuses on increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.  Thus, SEO and Content Marketing should work together at all times.

SEO is only one piece of the puzzle. Organic search engine is only one of the many ways you can get quality traffic to your website. Some of the other ways are: email marketing, social media, referrals, paid search, and so on.

Now that we’ve covered what is SEO and what it covers, here are some of the SEO basics:

• Keywords still matter. What are the keywords that matter most to your audience and to your brand? Make sure you have a list of those keywords, since you will be needing them. Then, make a plan of what keywords you want to highlight during certain periods and include those keywords in your articles, blog and communications.
• Make sure your content pages are being indexed correctly by search engines. For this point you will have to get a little bit technical. You will also need to ensure that you have 301 redirect pages set up to make sure visitors always reach their intended destination on your content pages.
• Optimize your titles and headlines.  Your titles must be readable, attractive, and if you can include one of your keywords. Here are some tips to write a better headline: first, use power and emotion words; this are words that will have an impact like: surprising, sensational, revolutionary. Second, optimize the length of your headline. Finally, as we said before, it is important that you include one of your keywords. We will cover this topic with more detail in another article Remember: "On average, 5x as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you’ve written your headline, you’ve spent eighty cents out of your dollar." – DAVID OGILVY
• Write meta descriptions: these are short descriptions that you must include for every post you write. This meta description is extremely important because it will appear in the page result of your search engine to give the reader an insight of what your post is about and why it is relevant. So make sure you write great meta descriptions.
• Custom title tags: you need these for every piece of content you publish.  The title tag are used by search engines to determine what your piece of content is about, even if that content doesn’t have a headline (like videos or photos).

These are only some of the things you need to take into consideration when referring to SEO. Keep in mind that SEO is long-term strategy. Traffic will likely not grow from one day to another, so be patient.