Optimize your content for search engines
Every aspect of your content matters when it comes to higher visibility, from the way you create your content to how you design your URLs and metadata.
In this article, you'll learn how to optimize your content for search engines while minimizing the burden on content creators.
Key points
- Use relevant keywords in your content to help people find it.
- Serve your content from descriptive URLs that clearly indicate where they lead to.
- Make your content well-readable and inclusive also for non-native speakers from other parts of the world.
- Optimize images and scripts to decrease render time.
- Include metadata to help search engines understand your content.
- Generate sitemaps to ensure all relevant content gets indexed by search engines.
Table of contents
Use proper keywords
Keywords in titles and introductory parts of your content are crucial from the SEO point of view. That's because these parts of your content are what your visitors see first.
Take care to always use relevant keywords in your content. Try to think about which terms your visitors would search for to find the particular piece of content. Using the right keywords results in higher ranking in search results.
Improve your URLs
In Kontent.ai, use URL slugs to build SEO-friendly URLs. You can set URL slug elements to generate slugs automatically from a text element, such as title.
Using descriptive URLs generated like this helps higher visibility, because URLs are one of the key metrics search engines pay attention to.
For instance, compare these URLs:
https://www.example.org/2023/01/15/287539884.phphttps://www.example.org/reviews/bialetti-macinacaffe
The latter would score higher in search engines' ranking, because it clearly describes where it leads to.
Make your content easy to understand
Content that's easy to understand is better ranked in search results.
For example, in English, to make content easy to understand means avoiding:
- passive voice,
- long and complex sentences with hard words,
- region-specific idioms that non-native users wouldn't understand.
You can test your content by measuring its readability score. Here are some tools you can try:
You should also segment your content with headings, use lists instead of long sentences, and illustrate written content by relevant, meaningful images.
Decrease render time
Another critical metric is the render time. Multiple studies have confirmed that over 80% of users leave a page if it fails to load in under three seconds.
Large images or complex scripts running on page load can significantly increase your page load times. Long load times lead to higher bounce rates (visitors leaving without interaction). High bounce rates, in turn, lower your website ranking.
You can test how Google, Bing, and other engines see your page using Fetch:
- Insert the URL of your website.
- Select a user agent you wish to test for (crawlers by Google, Bing, Duckduckgo, etc.).
- Make sure to select the Render checkbox to get render time and other valuable information.
Another tool to test your page with is Google's PageSpeed Insights. All these tools work on live sites.
Verify your changes first
If you want to make sure you're on the right way before deploying the changes to production, create a preview environment and use it for tests first.
Use metadata
It's important to meaningfully label all the metadata fields in your content types to make their purpose clear.
When using a headless CMS like Kontent.ai, you can choose what metadata you use and label the fields based on your needs. Moreover, you can integrate best-of-breed SEO tools that can use the metadata and boost your SEO.
There are (at least) two types of metadata: structural and content (descriptive) metadata.
- Structural metadata indicates the layout structure of your content elements. For example, “title”, “hero image”, and so on.
- Content metadata describes the semantics of your content and helps discovery, identification, and selection of resources. For example, “first name”, “job title”, and so on.
Use standardized metadata keywords
Schema.org provides a collection of standardized sets of metadata. Webmasters can use them to mark up their content so that search engines understand it. This can improve your search engine ranking considerably.
Reuse metadata elements with snippets
We recommend using content type snippets for metadata elements. Snippets enable you to reuse the same set of elements in various content types consistently. For example, articles and landing pages use different content types, but they require similar metadata for sharing on social media.
Structure content types with content groups
To make your content creators' lives easier, separate metadata elements from content elements using content groups.
Create a content group named “Metadata” and move the metadata elements or the snippet to it. The benefit is that your content creators won't have to think about metadata while writing content.
Sitemaps
Sitemaps are important both for search engines crawling your website and for your visitors. A sitemap for search engines enhances SEO of your website because it ensures all relevant pages are indexed by search engines.
There's also another type of sitemaps, and that's what we call a sitemap for visitors. It serves as a map of your website that helps your visitors understand its structure. You can create such a sitemap using a clear navigation or a dedicated page that serves as a signpost helping people find what they need.