Creating online content is important – but optimising it is very much the icing on the cake.
This is the final step that brings it all together, ensuring that your digital content is doing its part to generate traffic to your website and ultimately, new sales opportunities for your business.
When updating or sharing content to your website or video platforms (such as Youtube), there are a few simple things that you can do to ensure it’s optimised for peak performance.
Here’s a few handy tips to follow.
How To Optimize Blogs and Web Pages
When posting (or even updating) blogs, articles or pages on your website, it’s important to remember these five things…
- Title and Description
- Keywords
- Images
- Links
- Length
Always make sure that you have included a title and meta description to your pages. This can usually be edited below your post on most web platforms (Shopify, Wix, WordPress, etc) or by installing an SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO.
This information is what search engines use to preview your content, so it is important to ensure it’s both relevant and engaging. Think of this as the “pitch” for the page or article that you want people to click, as you have less than 15 seconds to both grab their attention and explain what it’s about.
If you are an existing Content Hive customer, our digital support team is more than happy to show you how to do this when loading your ready made blog articles.
Make sure the web page or blog post is around 500 to 1000 words long.
Use keywords, but don’t over do it. Nobody likes click bait. There is no exact formula, but the general rule of thumb is five times.
As an example, if you are selling organic baked goods, you would write an article about “how to make the best apple pie” in the hopes that it ranks on Google under that search term. This phrase only receives around 260 searches a month within Australia, so with low competition it’s very much achievable to find yourself ranking highly on Google.
You would need to use “best apple pie” five times throughout the text in the article, and ensure it is mentioned in the title and meta description.
Include at least one image, and ensure that it is optimised (please see below as to how this can be actioned).
Next, Optimising Images
When sharing images, photos and graphics online, be sure to have a relevant name and ALT tag for it. This tells search engines and social media platforms what the image is about, and shows that it is relevant to your brand, page or article.
You will want to make sure that the image is engaging for your target audience, as this is often the first thing that they will see when deciding to stop and visit your page, as opposed to scrolling on.
It’s worth noting that the image should also be relevant to the other content on your page – if your article is about apple pie, a picture of a Maltese Terrier isn’t going to get you very far.
Finally, Optimising Videos
Much like the above, for video content always ensure that the title and description is optimised.
Include the video transcript when you can, and have an engaging thumbnail image to encourage clicks and viewing.
For our amazing Content Hive customers – if we are creating content specifically for you, it will always come optimised and ready to roll. Otherwise, if this is a service you may need for your brand please don’t hesitate to contact us for further information.