How much consideration do you give to SEO when you’re crafting a piece of content? If you’re like most casino affiliates, you’ve probably got it in the back of your head, but may still be a bit fuzzy on the details.
That’s unfortunate because details matter to the legions of search bots that crawl your site every day, looking for specific clues to help them rank your content. Given the importance of page rank, a huge percentage of all traffic on any given keyword goes to the first page ranked, this kind of stuff matters.
Fortunately, there are a few factors that can help boost the overall SEO-worthiness of any content you’re ready to post.
Keywords Matter
Keyword selection should be made before you even start writing your content. Remember that the number of times you mention a keyword, or keyword density, doesn’t really matter for search purposes.
What really matters is what SEO Journal writer Maddy Osman calls, keyword intent. This process involves really thinking about the end user and the journey he or she is taking as they move closer to your content.
Size Matters…Sort of
Over the years there’s been plenty of debate about how long a piece of content needs to be in order to increase page ranking. These arguments are, for the most part, something of a fool’s game as the standards Google uses in its algorithms are both secret and constantly changing.
At the same time, there are standards for what Google considers to be thin content and publishers would be wise to heed them. For the most part, your content should be more than 250 words. This isn’t a hard and fast rule so a couple shorter articles aren’t going to kill your page rankings.
On the other end, there isn’t really a maximum word count for search purposes. Long articles can be great, if that’s what your readers are looking for. It’s safe to say that most of the average casino affiliate’s readers are not interested in 2,000 word screeds.
Finally
At the end of the day, your content has to be readable and interesting to the readers you’re actually looking to convert. As long as you’re writing at their level, and giving them good information they can actually use, your content will always be SEO ready.