It's one thing to tweak the content on your pages in order to draw more traffic, but to best find success with SEO you may need to alter the content strategy of your entire website!
To get the best results from your SEO strategy you should formulate it from the start - preferably before you have even registered your domain name so you can incorporate your keyterms into it! If you don't have the luxury of starting from scratch you may need to change the approach/tone of your website fundamentally to get good results.
Your existing content may use terms that people aren't familiar with, or just simply aren't interested in.
Often a business which is over-familiar with itself uses acronyms or terminology that the average person isn't familiar with - it is because customers do not know your business as well as you do (if they did they would not be contacting you carry out some work for them - they would do it themselves!) Be user-centric, and don't make assumptions - you will need to find out what people are typing into the search engines to find service providers like yourselves.
Once you have found out terms that are going to bring you thousands of visitors a month, you will then need target them in the content in an appropriate way, how do we do this??
You could take your existing content and tweak it to generate more traffic, but if your new target keyword varys from your existing terminology these sort of quick fixes can compromise the readability of the page - something that turns the user off, an issue for which search engine optimisation is notorious. In the same way, if you create a new page within a site to target a keyterm, this page can sometimes stick out like a sore thumb because it didn't feature in the original site architecture.
The best solution is to map out your site architecture working backwards from your selected keyterms.
You've heard of user-centred design right - how about search-user-centred design?? In theory this is quite simple to do - you know your visitors are searching for 'SEO Strategy' - you need to create a page called 'SEO Strategy' about, you guessed it, SEO strategy. Make sure you do all the keyword density testing etc, tick all the boxes and you are away! The difficult bit is making your reverse engineered site architecture work coherantly and intuitively for the user.
Common elements throughout a site's common page design form part of the content strategy. Ensure you have page elements that are positive for SEO as part of that strategy. Google likes keywords in H1 tags for instance - make it a policy to have a primary heading for each page (yes I've seen huge corporate sites without primary page headings).
Have a subject matter that is commonly know by several names? Create a page for disambiguation - it is great for SEO and for the user too!
In the same way that you can compromise the the readability of the content when you optimise a page for the search engines
you can easily compromise the usability of a site when you start letting SEO influence the architecture of a site too heavily. A website with three pages entitled 'SEO strategy' 'content strategy & SEO' and 'SEO & content strategy' may be good for traffic but is not going to make for a fulfulling user experience.
Logo design for alternative therapy company UKBowen
Last day of Inclusive new media design. Long story short: When applied to intellectual disability, accessibility means employing usability principles more conventionally thought of as optional... Will write a short article on this soon.
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