Creating Unique Content | Web Shop Manager
The final blog post in our Utilizing SEO series: Creating Unique Content and Ensuring Optimal Keyword Density
The last two weeks have covered basic SEO definitions and conducting keyword research. Now that you understand what Meta Information is and how to conduct keyword research, you can begin creating unique content and implementing what you have found into the backend of your site and start tracking your site’s performance.
Creating Unique Content for Your Page
Your content should have a positive impact on the reader, and not simply be self-promoting. If a user lands on your site by searching for new shoes, your content should be about how your shoes could benefit that potential customer, not that they will benefit them. A user will already know that you believe your product is the best on the market; give them content that stands apart from the competition and truly helps them make a smart purchasing decision. It is often appreciated by users to see that a company is transparent and is aware of competitors and can offer services that competitors cannot.
Make sure that whatever pages a searcher lands on are targeted to that user. Your page should have the primary keywords or keyword phrases within the title tag, the URL, and within the first few sentences of your content. This ensures optimal keyword density throughout the page, and does not overwhelm the reader with too many keywords throughout the article or not enough to make them leave the page. Any images on the page should have descriptive and keyword specific Alt Tag attributes. In today’s day and age, social media rules a lot of traffic and not optimizing your content for mobile users is not in your best interest. Make your content worthy of a “share” or “like” and see your page traffic increase significantly. Also, be sure to offer easy to access Facebook, Google+, and Twitter badges that allow a reader to instantly share what they have read. The days of simple keyword placement are gone, and content needs to be user-friendly and educational, not just optimized for search engines!
Rand Fishkin of the SEO giant MOZ states: “Personally, I'm happy to sacrifice "perfect" keyword placement in the title element or a URL for better user experience, a higher chance of having my content shared on social networks, or a better click-through rate in the search results.”
How Many Keywords Should I Implement Into My Content and Meta Information?
Once you have gathered a good list of keywords that are moderate in their search volume, are made up of two or more words, and have either a low or medium competition level, you can select which keywords you want to implement into your content and list in your Meta keywords tag in the backend of your site. It is within SEO best practices to implement around 3-5 keywords into your content, creating an even and optimal keyword density throughout the page, dependent upon how much content you have. It is important to note that your content should always be written for people, not search engines. It does not matter if you have keywords placed perfectly throughout your content if it is not easily read by users and does not make sense to them.
Always create unique content for users first, and search engines second.
Image courtesy of Moz.com
This infographic that Moz has put together provides a great example of a “perfectly” optimized page -- the keyword placement is throughout the content and not grouped together. It is also clear to anyone landing on this page that it is about donuts!
How Do I Implement My Meta Information?
The Meta information that you create will be implemented within the <head> section of your sites code.
The Title Tag is the most important aspect of your page and is coded as follows:
<head>
<title>Example Title Here</title>
</head>
Try to format your title tag in the following manner and keep it under 60 characters:
Primary Keyword or Phrase – Brand Name
Brand Name – Primary Keyword or Phrase
The Meta Description is not crawled by search engines, but searchers use it to decide whether or not they will click on your page, so it is still very important:
<head>
<meta name=”description” content=”This will show up on the search results as a box of text underneath the title.”>
</head>
The Meta Description should be under 160 characters or it will get cut off by Google and be trailed by “…”. Each individual page your site has should have its own unique Meta Description relevant to that page. Make sure this still contains keywords relevant to the page even though it is not crawled by Google as a user will see any keywords within the meta description you have bolded.
The H1 Tag is crawled by Google and is your page’s header. It should be similar to your title tag but can be different. Either way, it needs to be relevant to the page and should use the same keywords as your Title Tag:
<head>
<h1>This is what this page is about!</h1>
</head>
The Meta Keywords are listed within the code of your site and will give Google an indicator on what your page is about. Many sites stuff this section full of keywords hoping that Google will pick up on them. You need to use 3-5 specific and audience-targeted keywords in this section that are relevant to your site to avoid your page looking like spam to search engines:
<head>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 3”>
</head>
Each comma separates a keyword – make sure you keep phrases together and do not separate each individual word with a comma, or Google will see “new running shoes” as three individual keywords “new”, “running”, and “shoes” which are all very vague and will not help your site rank on Google.
The Alt Tag is what is used to describe an image to Google and is coded as follows:
<img src=”image source or link here” alt=”image description”>
Make sure your image description is a user-friendly, descriptive phrase and not a single keyword.
Taking Advantage of Web Shop Manager for Meta Information Implementation:
Web Shop Manager makes implementing SEO information extremely simple for our customers by having everything laid out for you. All you have to do is plug in what you have and save the changes:
To navigate to this section of your site, log in through Web Shop Manager and click on Content > Site Pages > Content > Brown Paper Bag.
You can now edit your home page and any other pages you may have by clicking the paper and pencil image. You will then land on the "Edit Page" section of Web Shop Manager where you can plug in your Meta Information – easy as pie!
I hope you enjoyed this 3-part series on basic SEO practices and have learned something along the way! Until next time.
By: Dana Nevins
BEDSLIDE - Client Testimonial
"The best thing out of everything was that our sales went up. The new site had a better design, the checkout process was better, and ultimately achieved all of our goals. That site has been up for a year and a half and we’re very happy with it, it’s still awesome." - Jake Plappert