Your website might have great content, but what good is that content if no one sees it? SEO, or search engine optimization, is the set of tools that people use to make sure that when someone searches for the type of content their website provides, search engines like Google or Bing will serve their content to the user performing the search.

However, there are plenty of misconceptions surrounding SEO. It seems everyone has a slightly different idea of what will improve a site’s search engine ranking and what won’t – and for good reason: Google’s, Microsoft’s and others’ proprietary search engines are constantly updating their indexing methods, and SEO techniques that once worked can stop working without warning.

With that in mind, let’s get things straight with a few of the best SEO practices to follow when creating content.

Perform keyword research and use those keywords in your content

The use of relevant keywords is just as important as it always has been, but now more than ever, so is how you use them. Google uses keywords to decide how to rank your content, and the algorithm makes this determination by looking for keywords that are relevant to the search a user performed. It also judges the content based on expertise and how those keywords are included.

Start by doing keyword research to help you determine what you should focus your content on to ensure you’re selecting keywords with relevance, authority, and search volume (Source: Hubspot). Most importantly, once you’ve done your research, make sure those keywords are an organic part of a good article, and not something that webcrawlers (and your readers) can tell you crammed in just to get yourself to the top of the search results. Not only will it be ineffective, but it will also turn off any potential readers who do find their way to your content, and then they’re sure not to come back!

Don’t stuff keywords into meta tags or spam the article with them

In the early days of the web, the keywords meta tag let you tell Google (and other search engines’ webcrawlers) what your site was about. Unsurprisingly, the fledgling SEO community learned quickly to exploit this, and “keyword stuffing” became a best practice. These long, misleading meta tags ended up lowering the quality and relevance of results. As a result, the keywords meta tag was gradually removed from the page ranking algorithm, and now sites that practice spam techniques like keyword stuffing end up lower on search engine rankings or get removed altogether (Source: Google Search Central). Instead of spamming your article and your article’s tags with them, make sure that those keywords appear organically within the titles, subheadings, and image tags of your article. By showing the webcrawlers indexing your site that the content is actually written about the subject of those keywords and not simply trying to fool an algorithm, you’ll avoid being penalized and ranked lower or removed from the search engine results page (SERP) altogether.

Links and backlinks

The number of quality links to your site is also one of the most important factors that improve your site’s ranking. Your experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness rankings are influenced by meaning, relevancy, content quality, usability, and context, and these elements are largely determined by both the links within your content and any external links that are leading back to that same content (called backlinks). All of this determines how the search engine ranks your content in its SERP (Source: Hubspot).

Make content mobile-friendly and follow good coding principles

Still, those keywords and links aren’t the only important things – Google takes a wide variety of factors into consideration. Content comes first, but a lot of other things matter, like using a secure HTTPS link, or the load time of your page. So does having at least one image, (and having a good file name and alt tag for that image!). So does low bounce rate. So does being mobile-friendly. Nearly half of web traffic comes from mobile devices, so if you want your site to perform well, it had better be optimized for those devices (Source: Statista). The algorithms being used to rank your site even take the demographics that visit your site into account – if you can get thought leaders in your industry to engage with your content, Google will serve it up to even more of them!

Write quality content

What you really want is to have a good site and good content that people will want to spend time reading. Search engines, and especially the AI behind them, have become smarter. They’ll know if you’re trying to trick them into ranking your content higher, and they know what good content that people will want to engage with looks like. The best SEO practice isn’t to write for SEO. It’s to write good content that engages your readers and to let the SEO develop naturally from that.

Review competitive pages

Chances are, you’re not the first person to ever create content on your subject, and one of the things that a webcrawler will do to determine if your content is relevant is to check if you’re discussing the same key points as the most popular content that’s already available. So, start by doing the same thing. Do a search on the subject you’re interested in presenting to your readers and look through the topics and sections in the top results. Does your content have the same sections? Are there important ones missing, or irrelevant ones you can remove?

With caution to double-check its work, you can even ask an AI chatbot like ChatGPT to generate an article for you to use as a reference source. Ultimately, all a tool like that is doing is scraping the web for the most popular content and re-organizing that content for you, so if it returns an interesting section title that’s not in your article, it might be a good idea to include that in your own copy! However, be careful to only use that as a reference and to write the actual content yourself; if you simply paste the content from the AI tool, the outputs it provides may not be written in the style you’d like and could include irrelevant content or even breach copyright! (Source: Moz).

Use headings and subheadings

Clear topic titles and useful and relevant sub-headings and bullets will help your readers to scan and read your page, and they’ll end up serving up the keywords your desired audience is searching for without you even noticing. Don’t worry too much about how Google will judge your site – spend your time making sure your visitors will want to engage – and the search engine rankings will follow!

Incorporate dynamic content

Once upon a time, webcrawlers were simpler creatures than they are today – dynamic content and JavaScript and all the fancier additions to the web were beyond their ability to digest. Now, as more and more of the web includes dynamic content, and companies like Google are Microsoft continue to make it their business to index the web, you can be sure that they’re not going to let their search results omit the huge pools of content that are loaded after the initial page load is complete. You can feel free to design your site creatively, knowing that webcrawlers will render your site’s JavaScript completely before they index it (Source: Google Search Central).

Regularly update your content

Make sure you update your content to maintain its relevancy. Check that links are still going the right places, refresh data points and make sure that they’re replaced by more current and accurate data if you’ve quoted statistics, and make sure the content stays relevant. No one is going to read an article full of information that’s several years old, but in many cases, the topic of the article is still something people are interested in. It’s not always necessary to retire or remove an old article, but make sure you’re keeping that content fresh!

If you build it, they will come

The most important thing you can do for your site’s search engine ranking is to make your site the best at what it is – full stop. You don’t have to tweak and rearrange and micromanage things in unintuitive ways anymore – just write engaging copy, design appealing images, and make the user experience as enjoyable as possible. Create a website that’s going to appeal to the demographic you want to attract, and the search engines will send them your way before you know it!