SEO is now much more reliant on a good content strategy. The good news is that there is no real need for a ‘Content for SEO’ section in this book. Chapter 13, looking at content marketing, works for SEO – as good SEO content is intrinsically linked to good content generally. It is, however, worth taking a quick look here at some specifics.
The content you need
Google uses ‘robots’ to try to interpret your site. It therefore stands to reason that informative content helps. While you and I can look at a picture of a bag of nails and know what it is, Google struggles (search engines are making progress on image recognition but we cannot rely on it just yet).
The content that sits on your site that describes your services/products and so on is commonly referred to as functional content. It will never win any awards but it really is a crucial requirement. A technically sound site with great functional content will go a long way, but to get real traction the site needs a degree of popularity. To help make it you will need a very different type of content: engaging content. This is content that gets attention from your target audience wherever they may be online.
It can be fun (but doesn’t have to be), it must be relevant and it must be on brand (for a full definition see Chapter 13). Engaging content done well will get published elsewhere and some will cite or link to your site. Each citation/ link acts as a signpost to Google that you are producing something of value that others like and, as such, you might warrant a higher position in the search engines for related terms.
SEO rules for content As we discussed earlier, the secret to SEO is not to optimize for the search engines but for your audience and this applies to content as much as any other area. If you have done your research right, you should find that you are naturally using very relevant keywords and the content you create should fly. Second, it is important to keep producing
