Content Optimization in SEO

Content Optimization

We all know content is king so now, let's give your site the royal treatment.

To investigate a page's content, you have various tools at your disposal. The simplest approach is to view Google's cached copy of the page (the text-only version). Alternatively, you can use SEO Browser or Browseo. These tools display a text-based version of the page, and they also include helpful information about the page (e.g., page title, meta description, etc.).

Regardless of the tools you use, the following questions can help guide your investigation:

• Does the page contain substantive content? There's no hard and fast rule for how much content a page should contain, but using at least 300 words is a good rule of thumb.
• Is the content valuable to its audience? This is obviously somewhat subjective, but you can approximate the answer with metrics such as bounce rate and time spent on the page.
• Does the content contain targeted keywords? Do they appear in the first few paragraphs? If you want to rank for a keyword, it really helps to use it in your content.
• Is the content spammy (e.g., keyword stuffing)? You want to include keywords in your content, but you don't want to go overboard.
• Does the content minimize spelling and grammatical errors? Your content loses professional credibility if it contains glaring mistakes. Spell check is your friend; I promise.
• Is the content easily readable? Various metrics exist for quantifying the readability of content (e.g., Flesch Reading Ease, Fog Index, etc.).
• Are search engines able to process the content? Don't trap your content inside Flash, overly complex JavaScript, or images.