Creating really high-quality content is not an easy task, especially if the goal is to write texts that are well received by search engines. As the amount of content grows, so does the level of competition. Only high-quality optimized content brings maximum benefit. How to make the process of its creation painless? We have compiled a list of recommendations for content optimization, covering technical and other aspects.

  1. CHOOSING THE RIGHT KEYWORDS FOR TARGETING

Consider our article as an example. Why do we write about content optimization? This topic is relevant for a wide audience of users. It has a high potential to attract customers, contains a key phrase for which you can rank high.

Ahrefs, a keyword explorer, provided the following results: 300 "content optimization" searches per month in the US. The potential traffic is even higher as there are many related key phrases, there are countries other than the US. The service also gave this key phrase a score of 7 on the difficulty scale. It is based on the average number of links to articles in the TOP 10 search results.

Note: The maximum difficulty score is 100 points. 7 points means links to 8 sites. If the score were 70 out of 100, this would indicate the presence of hundreds of links.

Provided that good content is created, the author of the article will receive at least 8 good links, providing a good chance of high positions in the search results. Competing for a specific keyword against sites with similar authority scores is a simple task. The situation changes dramatically if the competitor is a super-authoritative resource. Domain name authority is an important attribute of successful project promotion. With the right approach, it can be created in about 90 days.

  1. OPTIMIZATION FOR SEO

Search engines are using increasingly smart content analysis algorithms. Therefore, the presence of key phrases in a direct entry in the meta-headings, description, URL is not a prerequisite for successful promotion. If the site is new and has a low ranking, it is better to use direct occurrences of keywords in all the places listed.

Not sure if all published content is optimized for SEO? You can find out with the Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool. It analyzes the site, reveals various problems: repetitive titles, long or missing description, missing alt attributes, etc. Screaming Frog SEO Spider is able to find broken links.

By eliminating search engine optimization problems on the pages, you can achieve higher positions in search results.

  1. OPTIMIZING CONTENT FOR SHARING

Do you work hard to create quality content and want it to stand out from the crowd every time someone shares it on social media? To achieve this, you need to "tell" social networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) what information to display when a link to your site is posted.

Facebook content optimization is performed using the Open Graph protocol. In fact, Facebook receives code snippets for further interpretation:

  1. The og: title (title) tag tells Facebook what your page is about and how it should appear on the Social Graph.
  2. The og:description tag provides information about your page and encourages people to click through.
  3. The og:image tag is for placing the URL of an image that represents your page on the Social Graph.

All of these tools will help you optimize your content for Facebook, but with Twitter, there's more work to be done. Twitter Cards will help you with this. These are summary cards containing the title, description, and page thumbnail that are displayed each time someone shares your content on Twitter.

All this takes time and effort. If your site is built on the WordPress platform, the Yoast SEO plugin will help to simplify the task, which contains built-in parameters for defining Open Graph and Twitter Card tags. You need to go to the "SEO" > "Social networks" sub-item in the WordPress panel and select the appropriate tab (Facebook, Twitter or another social network).

After enabling the Open Graph metadata for Facebook, the plugin will automatically fill in most of the tags. For pages without images, you can select a default image. In the case of Twitter, you need to enable card metadata, then select a default card template.

At the end of all the settings, it will not be superfluous to check the correctness of the content optimization. A special Knowem.com tool will help with this.

  1. OPTIMIZED FOR READING

Many webmasters put so much effort into optimizing content for SEO that they sometimes forget to structure it in a way that makes it easy to read. Structured content is better and easier perceived by site visitors. You can improve the readability of texts in the following ways:

Many readers skim the text in search of a quick solution to a problem that has arisen. Therefore, you should write to the point, paragraphs should consist of a maximum of four sentences, contain a complete thought.

Make subheadings to break up text blocks. If the reader likes the subheadings, they are more likely to read the entire article.

Use copywriting techniques. There are techniques and tricks to get the reader's attention and keep it.

  1. IMAGE OPTIMIZATION

Relevant high quality images draw the attention of the audience to your content. You need to make sure that the images are optimized for search engines. Google is unable to view images. In order for the search engine to understand the meaning of the posted images, you need to add "alt" attributes corresponding to the content of the page. The image is also given a name that is displayed when the mouse cursor is hovered over the image.

To load images correctly, you need to make sure that they have the correct size (resolution). Too high-quality images take up a lot of disk space and take a long time to load, spoiling the overall impression of your content. For fast loading, an image compression mechanism is used.

Tinypng is one of the best image compression tools out there. Able to reduce the amount of memory (occupied by the image) by 30% or more, it does not degrade the picture quality.