Small Business Solutions: Content Optimization No-Nos

For modern marketers, content is king.

But that simple mantra carries with it numerous considerations—and potential pitfalls—when the goal is to deliver content that’s not only relevant to your audience, but that also displays prominently in online search results.

After all, producing great content means little if your search-optimization strategy fails to yield viewers.

That’s especially true for small businesses, who face the challenge of having to promote their content against large, well-established competitors, who often enjoy a search-result advantage simply because of the “trust” that’s inherent in their big-brand status.

There was a time when content marketers could achieve prominent search rankings by simply focusing on keyword density, i.e., populating a given piece of content with as many relevant keywords as possible—often to the detriment of the piece’s overall quality.

But just as the algorithms that determine search results continue to evolve, so must your content-optimization tactics.

To that end, I found an article from the Content Marketing Institute, “Optimizing Website Content: How to Fix What You’re Doing Wrong,” to be quite insightful.

From the piece:

“Currently, search engines are more focused on providing the best website content overall to searchers, and they are taking much more than keyword density and word count into consideration.

“As a result, website content optimization involves more than just inserting a specific keyword a certain number of times per page. Now, it is all about providing well-written, organized, useful, relevant, social-ready content for website users while optimizing the right elements.”

The article provides a laundry list of red flags to look for when retooling your optimization best practices, and offers helpful suggestions for how to align your efforts with the ways in which search engines currently prioritize online content.