5 Things you are Doing Wrong with Your Content

You might think that an article about the five things you should do with your content would be more useful than learning about five things you are doing wrong. However you can learn a lot from your mistakes. Sometimes the mistakes we make end up being the most useful lessons because in the explanation of why something doesn’t work, it makes it easier to see why and how something else would work better.

What is the point of publishing website content in the first place? You want it to be useful to your target audience. Since that is also is the goal of search engines, to match useful content with the audience, having your website content optimized properly is essential. You need well-written, useful, relevant, organized content that users want while still optimizing the proper aspects.

Plenty of people think they are doing it right, until months down the road their metrics say otherwise. So with that being said…what is wrong with your content?

5 Common Content Mistakes

• Don’t write for search engines – As Google and Bing change how they look at content that means quality content is really important. You want to create content that provides serious value for your audience. So make sure you aren’t using high-volume keywords because those words will have a lot of competition. Also don’t stuff keywords or use too high of a density in your writing because not only is it frowned upon but it also kills the readability. Finally don’t just write content to write keyword rich content. Focus on quality pieces rather than quantity.
• Don’t over-optimize each page – That means using keywords stuffed in the title tags, matching keywords in every bit of content on the page, meta keywords and meta descriptions push a page past optimized and into spammer territory. Once you are labeled as a spammer by Google or Bing it takes a lot of work to get that label removed.
• Don’t set it and forget it – Your content needs to be nurtured and should grow. If you post to a place that allows feedback and/or push your content to social networks then you need to keep track of what people are saying about it, post replies, creating a following, and keep the reach extending on each piece. It takes time and work but in the end is a very valuable step to extending your influence and the reach of your brand.
• Don’t worry about keyword rankings – Or at least don’t worry about them so much. There are a lot of metrics out there and too many people put much consideration into keyword rankings, among others. This metric has a lot of variables making the actual results unstable. Measure leads and revenue, that is what really matters to your business.
• Don’t go crazy with linkbuilding – Content link building should be done selectively. Think of it as finishing work that should be done with a deft hand rather than a sledge hammer. Skip directory links (which nobody uses), link exchanges (unless it is very related), article marketing and blog networks. Those are all low quality options which will then make your content seem low quality.

It takes work to create the right kind of content versus the wrong kind. You need to plan out what you are doing with each article, how you want to share with viewers, how you want to push the reach and consider why your audience will find it interesting along with using the proper title tags, keywords and meta descriptions. Hopefully this list of mistakes will help you recognize some areas in your content that can be improved and you can make adjustments that will help with the right way to do content optimization.