Search Engine Optimization

For site owners looking to keep their website supplied with “fresh” content, it is better to routinely publish new blog posts than completely redo your onsite optimization every month. Site owners should really only redo their onsite SEO every 1-2 years, not make changes every few weeks. By the time the search engines get around to re-indexing your website, you may have changed a major onsite SEO component yet again. Use new blog posts to tell the search engine that you have new content that they need to crawl and index.

Watch this week’s content marketing video lesson here!

For more content marketing video tips and lessons from Nick Stamoulis, check out the Brick Marketing content marketing video lesson archive .

Quick, which is more important to your SEO—keyword research or site content? It’s actually a bit of trick question. Keyword research and site content actually work together to create a well-optimized site. Conducting keyword research won’t do much good if your site is full of low quality content. Meanwhile, great content needs some help appealing to the search spiders, which is where having the right keywords comes in handy. One without the other means your SEO if off-balance, like a table with one short leg. But when it comes to writing content and conducting keyword research, which tactic deserves priority seating?

On-site optimization starts with having great content.

The main reason you need to make sure your content is in good shape BEFORE you start conducting your keyword research is because you will select your keywords based on your site content. Search engines rank individual pages, not your site as a whole. This means that each page needs to be optimized for itself by choosing the keywords that most accurately reflect the content.

If you were to do it the other way around, trying to write content that fits your pre-selected keywords, you end up writing for the search engines and not for humans. That is probably one of the worst SEO mistakes you can make! Content should always be written for a human reader. Writing content around your keywords might make your site read disjointed or haphazard, as well as seem like you are trying to stuff keywords in as frequently as you can.

You should also write your content first because you don’t always know exactly how each webpage is going to develop. You may find it beneficial to add new pages while condensing or deleting others. Choosing your keywords first may limit your creativity and effect the overall flow of your site.

When you weave your keywords into existing content, the key is to do so naturally. You’re aiming for 2-5 unique keywords per page, but that doesn’t mean you have to force them all in. Depending on the page’s content, certain keywords may make more sense or flow better than others. That’s fine! You don’t want to stick keywords in haphazardly where they don’t belong. For instance, a Boston-area Thai restaurant should be targeting “Boston Thai restaurant” and “Thai restaurant Boston.” These are two different keywords with two different search results. However, the restaurant owner may find he uses “Boston Thai restaurant” more frequently because it works better with the existing content.

“Content is king” is a popular SEO mantra for a reason. Keywords won’t help make a bad piece of content good.

SEO best practice dictates that a full-optimized site means every single page of that site (from homepage to individual product/service pages to the About Us page) has been properly optimized for SEO. This includes conducting keyword research, possibly rewriting the content, writing Meta tags and descriptions, customizing the URL, developing an internal linking structure and more. A smaller site could easily spend 40 hours or more optimizing itself. But what about a large site with 1,000, 10,000 or more pages? It could take months before a large site is full optimized. So what is a site owner to do?

In an ideal world, a large site owner would optimize every pageof their 3,000 page site and launch them all at once. But unless you have a team of SEO experts dedicated to optimizing your site and your site alone, this isn’t a realistic goal.

Site owners have to weigh time vs. return when it comes to on-site optimization.

One way to do this is start from the top down. What are the most important pages on your site? Which ones have the highest conversion rate? Which pages get large amounts of traffic? If you run an e-commerce site, which pages are the most profitable/top revenue generating? Optimize those pages first and roll the rest out in batches. You don’t have to wait for every page to be optimized before launching the newly optimized pages. Let those important pages start to work on your behalf.

White hat SEO also demands that site owners create unique Meta tags and descriptions for every page of their site. While Meta descriptions may not be an important ranking factor, they are the only snippet of content people see in the search engines and help convince users to click through to your site. If you have a 5,000 page website, writing those Meta descriptions could take weeks of work, and your time could be better spent elsewhere.

One way to speed up that process to is create Meta tag and Meta description templates. Before you start optimizing your site, create 30-50 (depending on the size of your site) templates that you can insert the needed keywords/information into. Cycling through those templates at random keeps you from having too many of the same Meta descriptions (to avoid being flagged as a spammer), but speeds up the process.

When it comes to optimizing your site, it is important to not lose the forest for the trees. There are a lot of little changes that have to be made to a page of content for it to be properly optimized. Multiple this by 10,000 pages and you are facing a mountain of work. Make it easier on yourself and think about getting the most value for your time.

Step 1 in the Brick Marketing SEO process is to conduct on-site optimization. I believe this should be the first step in any SEO campaign because the best link building strategy in the world doesn’t mean anything if your site fails to match up with user expectations and convert. One of biggest components of on-site SEO is optimizing the content to include 2-5 relevant keywords per page. The key is to naturally incorporate those new keywords into the existing content.

Watch this week’s video lesson below