The Internet is filled with content. It is mainly created to provide information to users. However, to best fulfill this objective, content must be ranked by search engines.
A better ranking improves its visibility and results in an increase in traffic.
However, it is difficult to create content that ranks well. Not all content ranks well because it does not necessarily meet the requirements of search engines such as Google. It must be optimized for them.
If you find yourself in such a situation, you may be considering rewriting the entire content.
What if we told you that there are some things you can do, just by editing the content, to improve your SEO and its chances of being better ranked?
In this article, we’ll look at how you can improve the ranking of existing content. So, keep reading if you want to know how.
How to improve the SEO of content for better performance?
1. By adding high volume keywords
If you know how content is created for search engines, you may have already added keywords to your content when you designed it.
But sometimes the keywords you added aren’t searched enough. If a keyword is rarely searched for, it is said to have low search volume.
You need to check the traffic for each keyword that you have added to your content. If not, we recommend trying to find new ones and adding them to your content.
This is because the search volume for each keyword can decrease over time. So even if you added high search volume keywords initially, they may no longer be effective after a while.
Therefore, updating your keywords is the first thing to do to optimize your content SEO-wise.
You may need to adapt new keywords to new places. They should look natural to readers and search engine crawlers.
Therefore, using new keywords in places where you are using old ones might not work.
2. By adding header tags and optimizing them
Header tags are part of thecontent optimization of a site. They are used to define the titles and subtitles of a web page.
If you haven’t added them yet, this is the second thing you can do to improve your content’s SEO and achieve better performance.
They help search engine robots understand what the title of the provided content is and what its subtitles are.
If they find relevant information in each header tag, the content is more likely to rank higher.
Heading tags start at H1 and can be used up to H6 or as many times as needed. They structure your content but must also be optimized.
By optimization we mean including keywords in these tags. They should be added to all header tags so that they fit naturally.
3. By improving the usability of the content
You may have already done your best to make the content user-friendly. But if it doesn’t rank higher, you may need to improve it even more.
To improve the usability of your content, you can try to improve its readability, clarity, and scannability.
When content is readable and its meaning is clear, it is attractive to the reader and they spend time reading it.
This reduces the bounce rate and improves the read time of your content, signaling to search engines that readers are happy with what they are reading.
Additionally, by making content more readable, it is easier for readers to navigate through it and understand the information it contains. Not only for readers, but also for web crawlers.
They can thus determine the ranking of the content and, often, when the content is readable, the ranking is good.
You can make content easier to read by adding headings, subheadings, and bullet points.
As for improving readability and clarity, you can try rephrasing your content. This will remove all complex words and change all complex sentences to simpler sentences.
If you have trouble doing it yourself, you can always use a text reformulator online.
4. Check and remove broken links
A broken link is a link on a web page that does not exist or is dead. Content that doesn’t perform well often has broken links. These links can reduce the authority and credibility of your content.
When the search engine sends its robots to the content and finds broken links, it automatically categorizes it lower.
If you have added links to your content, you need to check them one by one and see if any of them are broken. If you find any, delete them.
If the broken link is from a news source you added to your content, you may need to remove it and add information from another source with its link.
It’s better to have no external links than to have broken ones. Indeed, the absence of a link does not have a negative impact on the SEO of your content, unlike broken links.
5. Add new internal and external links
Once you have removed all the broken links from your content, you can add new links to it to improve its authority and credibility.
These links improve the SEO of your content and allow it to rank higher.
There are two types of links you can add to your content. Internal links and external links. Internal links are those that redirect the reader to a page on your own domain or blog.
External links, on the other hand, take the reader to an external source. This gives them more material to read and more information to absorb.
Search engines love this and their web crawlers even visit the links you added to see if they are relevant to your content.
If so, credibility is determined and the content is ranked accordingly. It is therefore recommended to add links to credible sources.
6. Add alt tags
Alt tags should be added to your content if you haven’t already. If you have added visual elements to your content, you should also create their Alt tags. These are alternative descriptions that describe what the visual is or is about.
Since search engines can’t see a visual like the reader can, they depend on alt tags to understand what the image is and index it appropriately.
If the images are relevant and the search engine thinks the reader will like them, the content’s chances of ranking increase.
To increase the effectiveness of these tags, try to make them as specific as possible, shorten them, include your keyword and make them unique.
Last words
Here are some of the things you can do to improve your content to get better performances SEO. The list addresses issues related to the content itself and its search engine optimization.
