I am sure some of you’ve read the Business Insider’s piece from this weekend titled AOL’s Master Plan. It reveals an internal SEO copywriting document, which is used by AOL to train their editors. Personally, I feel very excited to finally see someone focusing more on content optimization and long tail keywords and considering SEO copywriting as a serious part of their online marketing strategy. Here are few things I learned from this document and would like to share with you in today’s article:
1. Keyword Research – Make sure each word stands alone
Whether you are writing SEO copy from scratch or simply making changes to an existing one, it’s not always easy to know which keywords to target. So to avoid your production flow getting interrupted, be sure to come up with a keyword map first.
2. Content Creation – Search volume matters
Do not waste your time optimizing for keywords that no one is searching for. Of course search volume is not everything but the great content on your website could easily mean nothing if there is no search volume at all. So always do research with Adowrds Tool, WordTracker or KeywordDiscovery before you start editing your pages.
3. Content Optimization – Power of internal linking
Unlike off site SEO, internal linkbuilding is one of the few SEO tactics where you can really have full control. It’s a great way to boost a specific page by getting links from other relevant pages on the site. It also helps to tell spiders which page should rank for which keyword.
4. Content Promotion – Social promotion & Query Deserve Freshness (QDF)
Social media sites aren’t that valuable for link building on their own, but as a part of a comprehensive content promotion strategy, they can be very important. That being said, I always bookmark, tweet and update my facebook pages whenever there is a new post on my site. It not only helps crawling and indexing but also helps my site’s rankings.
5. Content Performance – Where to find more keyword ideas
Monitoring keyword performance and traffic is not just for reporting purposes. It’s also a great way to identify new keywords and new topics to write about. Simply visit your Google analytics account and sort your campaigns by keywords. I bet you’ll surprisingly find some new ideas for new content to publish on your site.