How do I create content with search engine optimisation (SEO) in mind?

Introduction
Crawling for content
But wait – make sure you keep it natural and authentic!
Effective use and monitoring for your SEO
Summary
Useful links

1. Introduction

Search engine optimisation (SEO) describes the actions you can take to improve how and where your webpages appear in organic search results.

Organic searching (i.e. search engine search results that do not include paid advertising) drives the lion’s share of web traffic, at around 53 per cent, ahead of paid advertising, social media, and other avenues. Not only is it more trusted by users and therefore receives more clicks, but smart SEO can help organic search to build results for you over time, whereas paid ads need ongoing spend to continue doing their job.

In short, a strong SEO strategy is vital to guarantee the quality and quantity of visitors to your webpages.

2. Crawling for content

Search engines use ‘crawlers’ to move through websites looking for answers to people’s search terms, in the form of keywords.

Keywords are vital to improve your search result ‘ranking’, meaning how high you’re placed on search result pages, and you should utilise these across your website. You can use keywords in the titles of pages, in the body of a page (for example, a sentence in a blog), URLs or even as alt text for embedded images.

For example, Festrail (a Welsh heritage railway) hit many of their organisation’s keywords in their ‘about’ page, such as ‘outstanding scenery, comfortable carriages and historic steam engines’. Ensuring words relating to the unique experiences and offers they provide are being included clearly on their webpage places them in a good position to be found online by people who are searching for these words and seeking out these experiences specifically.

Links are also pivotal to effective SEO, and can be categorised into three types: inbound, internal, and outbound. The most important of these is ‘inbound’, which is when a third-party site links back to yours. For example, your heritage site being listed on your local tourism board’s ‘Places to Visit’ section of its website. Inbound linking has the most impact as it’s seen as a trusted recommendation for you and your content.

‘Internal’ links are as they sound and are links that take users from one of your webpages to the next. There are three main ways you can use inbound linking to support SEO: for general site navigation between pages, for ‘related content’ links, or as a site map (i.e. one page with all or lots of your internal links on it).

Thirdly, outbound linking is when you link from your website to another. This also helps SEO as it demonstrates association between your website and other trusted sources. For example, linking site visitors to the Google Maps location of your heritage site.

3. But wait – make sure you keep it natural and authentic!

It’s really important to be purposeful with your SEO, and not utilise keywords that aren’t relevant to your own website and content or engage in ‘keyword stuffing’ where you overuse keywords out of context. Search engine algorithms are often able to detect this, and it can sometimes have a negative impact on your ranking.

Moreover, the quantity of your web traffic is irrelevant if it’s not of the right quality. For example, it’s better to drive ten people to your site that spend time on, and engage with it, than send 100 people who are going to bounce off as soon as they realise it’s not what they were looking for.

For example, the South Wales Miners Museum ensures their purpose shines through their copy and speaks directly to those who are as enthusiastic about the ‘proud industrial heritage of the Afan Valley’ as their organisers and volunteers are, rather than those who might be looking to take a more general tour and might not find this particular offer of interest.

Similarly for links, you should only be looking to link to and from sites that are relevant. You might receive email requests to ‘cross-link’ from agencies working on behalf of businesses, to increase your web traffic. Again, this can have a detrimental impact if it’s obviously inauthentic and irrelevant to your own site and content.

Despite this, authentic partner-linking can be extremely valuable, so do ensure you’re reaching out to relevant partners and making sure you’re including one another’s links on your webpages. A ‘resources’ section is an effective way of achieving this.

Consider your end audiences, your end goals (for example, donations, downloads, or registrations), and then what you can do to bring the two together. For example, if your audience are tourists and your end goal is donations, what search terms might bring them to your page with the hope of them donating to support your cause.

4. Effective use and monitoring of your SEO

As mentioned earlier, there’s a myriad of places you can use keywords throughout your site. Generally speaking, the more visible the content, the bigger the impact it will have on SEO. For this reason, URLs can be great for SEO, and building a clear site map structure can help you make the most of this. QuickSprout has some useful tips on some practical steps you can take to achieve this.

However, both alt text and ARIA tags (used to make webpages more accessible) can also be effective, as can including keywords in closed caption videos.

Keywords for SEO can be split into two categories: ‘head’ and ‘long tail’. ‘Head’ refers to general and popular search terms, while ‘long tail’ describes search terms related to words and topics that are more specific and less often searched for. These have less competition and can pin-point user intent more, and so are arguably more valuable to you and your SEO tactics!

Going back to Festrail as an example here, keywords such as ‘woodlands, mountains, rivers and castles’ could be considered in the head category as they are more general and likely to come up with multiple search results. However, ensuring they are including specific locations such as ‘Ffestiniog Railway’ and ‘stunning Aberglaslyn Pass’ are in the ‘long tail’ category as they are likely to lead to far fewer online results for those looking to visit these locations, with Festrail showing much higher in search rankings.

There are some brilliant tools you can use to see the kinds of keywords people use to discuss topics relevant to your work, like Moz Keyword Explorer or GetKeywords.

In addition to this, Google Analytics can help you learn more about who, when, and how people interact with your own website, while Google Search Console can provide you with insight on how to rank better in organic search results.

5. Summary

Woman holding mobile phone, taking photograph of male standing in archway — Photo by Michael Sala on Unsplash.

Keywords and links, and where you place them, can play a major part in driving people to your website.

However, before starting to explore SEO, make sure you’ve set out a clear target audience and the objective/s for when people land on your page.

You should use authentic and relevant content and third parties’ links to ensure that you achieve this, and above all else ensure that your content stands out for the right reasons. Google’s Webmaster Guidelines is a useful resource for further information on this.

Be bold, clear, engaging, and useful, and you’re more likely to keep people on your pages for longer.

Finally, make sure you’re analysing the success of your SEO along the way, whether that’s looking at clicks (from searches), bounce rates (the number of visitors who left your website after landing on the initial page) or the time visitors spend on pages.

SEO might sound a little abstract or daunting to those unfamiliar with it, but it’s simply about using the tools available to us to make the way we describe and present our content as clear and detailed as possible.

Good luck!

6. Useful links

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Published: 2022

Resource type: Articles

Except where noted and excluding company and organisation logos this work is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) Licence

Please attribute as: "How do I create content with search engine optimisation (SEO) in mind? (2022) by Matt Horwood supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund, licensed under CC BY 4.0