Now that we know what SEO is, and now that we know what website SEO is, let’s learn about CONTENT SEO!

What the heck is content SEO, anyway?

Content is the text you post to your blog or website…Duh, thanks for nothing! (Be patient, young grasshopper!). Content SEO, on the other hand, is the practice of making your text easy to find for the search engines, as well as relevant to the search they are performing.

How do the search engines do it?

First, you need to know that Google, and the other search engines, don’t actually search the web every time a search term is typed into the search box. They search their servers. Huh…?

That’s right, Google and all the others have literally millions of servers around the world which are constantly “crawling” the web for content relevant to search terms they’ve stored in their systems. They could never search the entire web for you as quickly as they do if every search was a new one. With literally billions of websites to search, there is just too much information out there. Plus, they rank the quality of the info they deliver to you and that takes time too. So, they store it up for you and everyone else, and make it available in seconds. Cool, huh?

Why do the search engines prefer text?

Since text is the easiest type of information to crawl, that also makes it the cheapest to crawl. That means the search engines absolutely love text – and they always will. Beyond that, as the web began to develop as an information-sharing platform, and due to the relatively prehistoric technology available at the time, it developed as a text-based platform. So, text-based searching became fundamental to the development of search engine technology. It is now so deeply ingrained, it will never go away. And, again, it’s cheap.

Here are some tips on Content SEO:

Content SEO techniques…

1. Use your Keyword in the first 50-100 words of your text
2. Use your Keyword in the approximate middle of your text
3. Use your Keyword in the last 50-100 words
4. Text should be no less than 300 words
5. Highlight your Keywords with bold, underline, and italics, once each

For more information on content SEO techniques, check out this article at SEOmoz.

The final step to effective content SEO…

You knew this one was coming, didn’t you? Just as with website SEO, to make your content SEO efforts pay off for you, you must do these things consistently and relentlessly. This means – every time you post!

In other words, if you don’t want to waste all the effort of creating quality web content, perform these few simple tasks on each and every post to maximize your optimization efforts.

(This is post 3 of 4 in a series on SEO and SEO Basics)

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