SEO is like a symphony of many parts theres different instruments, paces, measures; all of them need to be in harmony to execute a beautiful performance. Oftentimes, technical SEOs will disregard, or not take content marketing as seriously as they should and the creative content marketers arent particularly interested in hearing about a robots.txt file.
To give the most simple of analogies: your website is a car. Technical SEO is your wheels and engine. Content marketing and the inbound links as a result of content marketing are the gasoline. You can put all the gasoline in a car you want, but if your tires are square you wont go anywhere. At the same time, you can have an immaculate automobile with everything in tip-top shape but if you dont feed it sweet, sweet gasoline it wont go forward. You need both.
Although you dont have to be a technical SEO expert as a content marketer, it helps to have a general background to understand the pieces of it you need it place for your content to perform as well as it should. Heres the basic groundwork of technical SEO you need in place for your content to reach top performance.
Site-Wide Considerations:
- txt: Make sure your robots.txt file does not block access to the landing page where your content lives (or, for that matter, any page that your content page links out to). You can check this using tools like Screaming Frog and Google Search Console Robots.txt Tester.
- Content on the Main Domain: One of the goals with content marketing is raising your Domain Authority through the acquisition of strong, natural inbound links. While there is root domain authority, whats much more important is the authority of your main website. Ensure that your blog is a part of the main domain (www.example.com/blog/article) rather than on a subdomain (blog.example.com). In our expertise, strong links to the blog subdomain do lift the sites authority however, its not as impactful as hosting on the same subdomain, and keywords dont see the same lift they do.
- Sitemaps: Ensure the page containing your content is included within the websites XML sitemap as soon as its posted, allowing Googlebot and other spiders to pick it up as quickly as possible.
- Navigation/Inlinks: Your content should never be on an island the natural structure of a website is to have pages organized in a hierarchical, easy to understand manner. The page containing your content should be accessible via navigation in some manner be that from a resources page, list of blog articles, etc.
A good way to check for orphaned pages is to run a Screaming Frog crawl and then compare against your sitemap (assuming you are adding new pages to it as they go live). Dump both into Excel and eliminate all columns from the Screaming Frog report except for inlinks and outlinks. In the same sheet, dump the URLs from your XML sitemap; and then highlight duplicates. If something is not highlighted or has an inlinks number of zero, its an orphaned page.
- Other Considerations:
- Your pages should always be structured with underlying HTML dynamic JavaScript isnt well read by most spiders. You can test by turning off CSS and JS using an extension such as Web Developer for Chrome.
- Many technical SEO items are closely tied to user experience your site should be accessible on all devices and load quickly. Its going to be tough convincing a writer to feature your content when hes waiting a minute on his iPadonly to have things not render in the correct manner.
Content Page Considerations
- Importance of the Write-up: Images are a bit of an odd part of search while robots can pick up on context such as colors, alt-tag, and image information; the main way of inferring information about your content is through relevant text around the image.Most write-ups to accompany an infographic should be between 350-500 words (more is generally better) and back-loaded meaning, one or two paragraphs at the top introducing the concept of the content, then the content itself, and then 4-5 paragraphs offering details on the content and further analysis. Like any written content on your site, this should be unique, relevant, and offer value to the user.
- Internal Links: Youll be (hopefully) driving quality links to your content but how do you pass that authority to the pages of your website you want to rank? Internal links. Within each write-up, we recommend 2-3 internal links with appropriate anchor text thats also relevant to the content in play. (Dont go linking to your paid search page, if your entire content piece focuses on organic search). Keep it natural, but dont be afraid to use matching anchor text for the keywords you want to focus on.
- Other Considerations
- The title tag and meta description for your contents page should be relevant and appropriate when titled correctly and following correct structure, your content can drive significant search traffic long after active promotion has ended.
- Your content, if visual, should be alt-tagged appropriately. Its also helpful to use basic, lossless compression for images you can also link to a higher-quality version of the image from the one that appears on the content page, which will improve your load times without impacting outreach results.
By ensuring your basic technical SEO requirements are covered, youll not only help your content to perform better by making it more accessible to search engine robots and publications alike youll improve your site overall in the process. SEO doesnt happen in a vacuum in order to yet where you really want to go, it takes a number of factors. Make sure that every instrument hits the right notes, and youll have a beautiful symphony of inbound links, rising keywords, and more conversions in no time.
More about Kyle:
Kyle Olson is the Senior Content Manager at Digital Third Coast, a progressive SEO, PPC, and Inbound Marketing agency in Chicago. See Kyle speak at Pubcon Las Vegas where hell be covering how the lines between Content Marketing, SEO, and Public Relations are becoming more and more blurred and how you can capitalize on it.
