Content Generation & Formatting

A Step-By-Step Guide to Small Business SEO

As mentioned in previous chapters of this guide, content development is one of the key cornerstones to successful search engine optimisation. However, filling your brand new website with endless pages of poorly written content or, worse still, content copied directly from other websites, will not help you to secure link popularity with web users or trust with the search engines. Following on from Part Fifteen: On-page Optimisation Overview, this chapter of my step-by-step guide to small business SEO looks specifically at the on-page topic of generating & formatting content for your site and how small business owners can maximise the potential of new sites by developing content tailored to a specific niche. To go back to the start of this guide you can read my Introduction.

Generating Useful, Targeted Content

If you have followed this guide from the beginning, you should by now have established through your key-phrase research an extensive list of “head”, “long-tail” and “local” search term targets. Each of these key-phrase terms should be unique although connected to your “head” key-phrase theme or “niche”. The next stage for your web development process should be to put in place a content generation plan with the aim of gradually increasing the volume of genuinely useful web pages that individually target your unique key-phrases.

Content generation and link-building are without doubt the two most important elements of SEO. If you don’t provide your website users with useful, engaging, informative, unique, newsworthy, intelligent or amusing content, you will not be able to entice people to link to you naturally. Authority sites will almost never link naturally to a site that does not provide at least one of these qualities, and authority links are the ones that count! (More on link-building and determining link authority in part eighteen).

Small business start-ups need to give a lot of thought to the presentation and delivery of content on their new websites. What differentiates your content from what can be found elsewhere on the web? What style and tone of writing are you employing to appeal to your target market? What is the purpose of your content, is it simply to drive sales enquiries or to build credibility as an authority on your subject?

Formatting Your Content

Once you have considered these questions and determined your content generation plan you next need to write the content itself, format it and publish it on your website. Many big businesses employ experienced SEO copywriters and engineers to do this work, however, some small business owners may wish to develop this process in-house to keep development costs as low as possible. Should you decide to do this there are several things you should consider when writing and formatting your web copy:

• Target just one key-phrase per web page. Don’t over-use this key-phrase but ensure it flows throughout the document.
• Use synonyms and phrase variants throughout your copy. An intelligent, well-structured piece of writing should do this anyway.
• The search engines still pay attention to the text within your H1 tags. Ensure that your H1 titles accurately convey the content of your page and re-iterate the text within your H1 title in your opening paragraph.
• Be cautious using bold, italics and underlined tags. Use sparingly to highlight relevant target key-phrases but don’t highlight every instance of the same key-phrase.
• Cross-link to other pages within your site. This encourages users to explore related content and helps search engines crawl and index your site more effectively.
• Link out to authority sites. Links from your site to other established, trustworthy sites will help to place you in the “right neighbourhood”.
• Consider content velocity. Take care with the rate at which you add new pages to your site. A steady, daily or weekly addition of web pages is preferable to sudden spikes or lulls.
• Avoid cloaking and spamming techniques such as keyword stuffing.

Content Checklist

• Always aim to generate useful content aimed at your customers at users
• Create a content development plan – essential for growing your site traffic
• Follow the formatting tips above everytime you publish new content

Part Seventeen

This chapter has covered some of the questions small businesses should consider when developing a content generation plan plus the key elements to formatting content for the web. The next chapter will look at some advanced techniques for optimising title and description META tags. Click here to go to part seventeen.