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Designing Content on Your Site with SEO in Mind

First, let’s get it out of the way: great content is the best SEO practice. You can safely ignore every other detail, but if you write content that is unforgettable, people will find your website and your audience will grow. 

With that being said, it doesn’t hurt to play by the rules in order to get as much mileage as you can out of the content you create. 

The first thing you will want to do to make your content more SEO-friendly is to do some keyword analysis to figure out what people are actually looking for related to your industry. Do this by going to the Google Keyword Planner and seeing what the highest ranked keywords are for your field. You’ll want to get really specific about your customer base. There is entirely too much competition for top level keywords (food in Toronto), so the space you can make the most impact is the so-called long tail keywords that customers are still looking for but that have less competition (best ramen in [Toronto neighborhood])

Check all this on the back end, with analytics. You spent all that time planning. Are the keywords you used actually paying off? Or, when you look at your analytics, is it other keywords that customers seem to be responding to? If so, it’s time to reconfigure and follow this new path as your continually refine your way to success. 

One metric you’ll definitely want to keep an eye on is your bounce rate on various content pages you create. This shows you how many customers arrive on your site and leave straight from the page them came to. This will tell you something about how that particular page is working in context with the rest of your site. Ideally, you want the customer to keep clicking through your site rather than getting the one bit of info and then leaving right away.

Take care of your SEO technical best practices — this is easy to do, as it’s a basic list, and we’ve covered it before. Just make sure you’re doing all these things so your site can be indexed correctly and the search engines can actually tell what the heck your site is all about.

Another thing you may want to think carefully about is post length. The Internet is a wide and shallow place, meaning that there is a ton of content out there that is very basic. One thing that’s been definitively linked to better SEO is post length — for whatever reason, posts clocking in at 1,500 and above words do better than their counterparts. The reasons for this may be technical (more content for the search engines to analyze in order to correctly classify the page) or they might be user-related (a longer post is likely to have better information and give the reader the answer he or she is actually looking for).

In any case, when thinking about SEO and site performance, it’s pretty clear that you are better off with less-frequent but longer and more definitive posts. One way to think about this is that, whatever the topic happens to be, you want to aim to write the definitive post about it — the most comprehensive, well thought out, and generally helpful post that you can think of.

We hope that this information helps you create better content and get readers to your site. At CanSpace Solutions, we take care of all the other necessary back-end stuff to ensure your site can be crawled properly and you’re getting the search ranking you deserve.

CanSpace Team

CanSpace Solutions is Canada's leading domain name registrar and web hosting provider. Keep an eye on our blog for expert information on domain names, websites, and running a business online.