Content marketing is creating articles, web pages, videos for users that the Search Engines crawl, index, and ideally return (high up) on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Note this subtle wording , the content is not written for the Search Engines it’s written for the users. Modern algorithms are so sophisticated you can not optimise for them. So, marketers (like me) have to write content for humans (like you) and not for search engines.
Just a few pointers when creating content:
You need relevant Keywords in the content, but not too many. The web page needs valid HTML code. Semantic markup (schema.org) helps. As does a clear and thought through layout. All web pages must be responsive, load fast (page speed), have some backlinks, internal links and a clean and correct URL path.
So far so good but even here it gets complicated. Duplicate content (the same content, repeated or copied) needs to be avoided. When this can not be helped then it should be signposted with canonical tags, this shows the Search Engines where the master copy is.
And then there is the text itself. Writing, rewriting and, proofreading is not easy. The time and effort required to produce one page of original content and should not be underestimated nor left to the junior in the office. Or as William Knowlton Zinsser said in his book On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction:
“Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard.”
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