Surprised to find out that good SEO is more about good content than good web design alone?  Well, it’s true.  Many web designers will tell you that they’re going optimize your site to achieve top search engine rankings—and while their intentions might be perfectly legit—the fact of the matter is that a site’s SEO-friendly design & development really only serves to support excellent, keyword-rich content to be contained within a site.

At least that’s the quick version anyway.  Regardless, now that we have that common misconception out of the way, we should move on to the real bread and butter of getting higher search engine rankings…writing good, keyword-rich content.

What Are The Standards Of Good Keyword Optimized Web Copy?

Writing good SEO-friendly copy for your website will generally be a matter of customizing to specific site needs on a site-by-site basis.  However, there are some rather steadfast guidelines to follow:

Keyword Research First – It’s impossible to write good keyword-rich content without having specific knowledge beforehand on which keywords and keyword phrases you’ll utilize.  Many start their research by using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to come up with ideas for some high demand, low supply keywords to use.  Regardless of the method, you’ve got to pick topically relevant keywords to use first.

Write Naturally – Some “over-optimizers” used to suggest that the best way to rank well with good keyword rich content was to use a certain keyword density, or in other words, an exact percentage of how many times the keyword was used in the copy compared to the overall word count.  This is nonsense these days—could even be implied as spam—so avoid.  Instead, try to create a helpful piece of content that you would write regardless; it’s best to write naturally and then maybe go back and add in the keyword phrase you’re optimizing for a few times where it fits optimally.  Never, never over use it on purpose though.

Optimize Your Title & Headings – Definitely use the keyword phrase exactly once within the page’s title.  This is super-important.  You might also use it naturally in a heading or sub-heading within the page copy.  Other than that, just remember: keep it natural.

Use Similar Keywords – If you’re writing a topic focused piece of web content or blog post, chances are already good that you’re using lots of natural related lingo throughout the copy in addition to your optimized keyword or keyword phrase.  This is good—you’ll want to have a few appropriate related keyword variations and relevant similar keywords within the copy.  Again, though, this is almost instinctual anyway when writing topically-focused web content.

The Bottom Line – Keep it natural, natural, natural.  Write what your visitors want to read.  Be sure to answer questions they’re asking and address concerns they might have.  Really work hard to put yourself in the mindset of your target visitor when writing.  By all means, build the content around a specific keyword—and ideally focus on just one main featured keyword per page or post.  But at the same time, never push it to the level of becoming unnatural or spammy.

Follow these simple steps to writing good, keyword-rich content—and of course, make sure your web designer has paid attention to the important supporting factors within the design & development.  With this strategy in mind, you’ll be well on the way to getting higher search engine rankings.

Setting up a CMS (this stands for Content Management System) to enable complete management of your new website’s content, or as an add-on to and existing site, has become one of the single most popular requests for web developers these days.

And if you think about it, it really just makes a lot of sense.  Having the ability to manage your site’s content in-house—without the expense of costly web developer fees every time you want to add or edit a new page or a page’s content—is practical, efficient, and can even be fun for the person managing the content.  It definitely takes a lot of the tedious back and forth out of managing a website.

Even though the idea is to enable managing a website by nearly anyone assigned to the task—without regard to their degree of technical prowess—sometimes setting up the content management system can become a little bit too over-simplified.  Clarity and simplicity is certainly a good thing to look for in a custom-built CMS, but you still need to have a robust feature set that allows your website to hold its own in a very competitive online environment.

So here’s our essential CMS advice in this case…Make sure your CMS gives you the ability to manage your own Meta-data on every single page.

By default, our custom-built Sleepless Media CMS gives you the full ability to manage and edit each of the most important Meta-tags, including:

• Page Title
• Meta Keywords
• Meta Description

The bottom line is that too many content management systems skip over this vital integration.  No matter what you might hear, having full access to customize each one of these SEO-essential Meta-tags, on each and every page of your site, is incredibly important.

It’s a well known fact that a Page Title that contains the page’s targeted keyword phrase toward the beginning of its string of words is probably the single most important on-page SEO factor you can control.  The search engines depend on this Title tag to understand your page and what it is about.

In fact, it’s so important that in most cases, the search engines will actually use the Title tag verbatim as the search listing title (the main link that you click on to visit a searched-for website within the search results when you do a search).  This is simply not a place to have an automatically-generated snippet of content inserted by default—you want to customize each page’s Title tag to contain the primary keyword phrase and encourage the searcher to click on your search listing link.

Additionally, having total control over every page’s Mega keywords and Meta description is also substantially important.  Keywords still play an understated, yet relevant role in how some search engines interpret and rank your website’s pages.  And the Meta description is very frequently used by the search engines as a part of your search listing results.  You definitely want to be able to manipulate and manage these components to help get the click and maximize your SEO efforts.

Without a CMS that enables control over every page’s Meta-tags, this is impossible.  Ensure your CMS system includes complete page-by-page Meta-data management capability.