Welcome back. If you came from part one, A muggles guide to SEO, you’ll have just learnt about on-site and off-site content. Let’s explore that a bit more.

All your content, whether off-site or on, needs to be relevant, and written naturally with complete sentences, good grammar and no typos. You see, Google and other search engines always try to serve people the best results possible for a better user experience. If you’ve just written the word “magic beans” all over the place on your website without any rhyme or reason, the search engines will penalize this deceptive tactic and send you packing far down the rankings. And nobody wants that.

For example, this SEO guide has been optimized to reach people who are looking to learn about search engine optimization. You’ll notice the keyword “SEO” is right there in the title, as well as in the very first line of copy. The term SEO is also found in some of the section headlines and peppered throughout the article. The term “search engine optimization” is also placed high up, right in the subheading, capturing that set of keywords. It’s a real article, with relevant and useful (hopefully) content for people needing an intro guide to SEO practises.

So, just keep in mind the adage that “content is king queen” and make sure yours gives value to your customers and you’ll be halfway there.

But it does take patience. A key thing to remember is that nothing happens overnight when it comes to internet marketing. SEO is a tactic that most online businesses use and have been using for quite some time. So, you may have an awesome new site, with great content and the ideal keywords, however other sites have done the same thing, have already earned a strong reputation and the search engines know they provide quality info and content, so they’ve earned a spot at the top of the rankings. You’ve not earned Google’s trust yet. It does take time and, like anything, hard work.

What kind of content is relevant?

Go ahead and ask. Like I wasn’t going to tell you anyway.

Coming up with great content isn’t easy and it takes a fair bit of effort. But essentially, your content needs to provide value to readers, inform, solve a problem or provide some sort of solution for them in relation to your product or service. If it doesn’t, then they’re going to click away to something else. That’s not good. You see, Google and the other search engines measure something called “time-on-page.” This tells the search engine if people are actually sticking around to read your content or if they're clicking on it and then away quickly. If people aren’t spending enough time on your content, the search engines don’t consider it useful information, and your page is sent far down the rankings. So, knowing what your customers want, and what they are looking for is important to developing the right, relevant content.

How customers are searching for what they want will also inform your content, which is why using the correct keywords is also critical to great SEO. As we said earlier, people searching for magic beans will most likely type those words into a search engine, but probably not the more elegant sounding “enchanted legumes.” So, there is no real worth in using those particular keywords in your content. Keywords are like the ingredients in a magic love potion. Get an ingredient wrong, say eye of toad instead of eye of newt, and your potion is going to attract the wrong suitor. Likewise with keywords. So, the thing to remember about keywords is It’s all about knowing your customer’s search intent and what they would naturally use to look for a particular service or product.

In Part 3 of this SEO guide, we’ll show you other ways to drive traffic to your site.