- Step 1: Conduct Digital Audits
- Step 2: Write Your Strategy Brief
- Step 3: Identify and Research Your Keywords
- Step 4: Plan Network Architecture
- Step 5: Sitemapping
- Identifying the Different Roles of Web and Blogsites
- Step 6: Assessing Content and Keyword Relationships
- Step 7: Writing the SEO Page Forms
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Step 6: Assessing Content and Keyword Relationships
What To Do and What Not To Do for Web Content
Ask the right questions upfront: Can you produce enough good content for search engines and your audience on your WordPress site? If the company has existed for a while, you can find and repurpose old content—brochures, articles, whitepapers, and ads, for example. Such content can be placed in the news/PR or even blog section and displayed with old dates to demonstrate history and longevity for the company and help SEO with content that can be indexed. If the content is not already electronic text, it can be scanned and run through optical character recognition (OCR) software to convert to electronic text. Going through old PR, awards, and news article research can even excite the client, rather like going through old family albums. Memories or laughter can be sparked by the discovery process. You don’t have to clutter the site with this—just organize useful content and optimize it for full search engine potential.
You also might have the idea to share content or blogging with others. That’s a good idea, but be careful—there are good SEO ways to do this and bad ways. We’ll dive deeper into this in Chapter 5. However, there are still big “no-nos” for content topics where search engines are concerned. The following is a paraphrased blog post from a group discussion on regularly debated content types in regard to search engine blocks. This is a good debate topic (try it at your next alumni event or Friday happy hour!), but realize that such content is dicey for search engines. It’s best to stay away from these topics in your own blogging if you can:
- Viruses and malware.
- Leaked personal ID info (such as credit card numbers).
- Porn.
- Violent images (note that some people find this more debatable, and some sites are focused on this, such as news sites or activist sites).
- Hate content (some also find this in some cases pertinent; for example, to research hate messaging and groups).
- Hacking instructions.
- Bomb-making instructions.
- Pro-eating disorder sites (sites that teach people to enact anorexia or other disorders; some consider this helpful for research by parents or doctors).
- Satanism and Wiccanism (there seems to be a case for freedom of expression or religion for this type of content).
- Necrophilia (some feel this still has bearing for research as cultural phenomenon).
- Content farms (remember that this is bad for SEO, but the smart ones are hard to identify as such; gray hat is hard to nail down).
- Blackhat SEO boards—This might be helpful to research the spam tactics you should shield yourself against.
NOTE
Want to Learn More?
For more, see the full discussion post: http://www.brafton.com/news/matt-cutts-on-search-content-standards-sessf.
Associating Best Keywords to Web Pages or Blog Posts
After doing keyword research, I like to write a simple plan to associate each primary keyword with a specific web page or blog post on the existing site (assuming this is a rebuild rather than a new site with no content). After I’ve read over the existing site’s content, I take my client-approved keyword list and attach one primary keyword each. The list looks something like this:
Keyword-to-Page List
Primary keyword phrase: ‘Custom crystal awards’
For which web page: “Art Gallery”
URL = example.com/glassblowing/glass-art-gallery
Primary keyword phrase: ‘Glass custom trophies’
For which blog post: “Studio Tours”
URL = example.com/custom-glass-blog/glassblowers-studio-tours
Primary keyword phrase: ‘Corporate awards trophies’
For which web page: “Testimonials”
URL = example.com/glasswork-testimonials