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You need to put together a basic brief of what your content needs to include and achieve. This is great to give to your content provider or outsourcer but it works equally well to use personally as a reference when producing your own content.
Make a list for the following and complete.
Primary Keyword: Topic of the article
Title: Include the primary keyword in the title
Sub topic keywords: Ideally a minimum of 4 related keywords found in the related search feature at the bottom of the search results page as previously featured.
Word count: always try for a minimum of 1000 words but make sure you publish content with varying amount of words, so post 1 is 1200 words; post 2 is 1100 and so on.
Keyword density: No hard and fast rules here, try to get the primary keyword in the body of the article 5 times but no more than 7 times in 1000 words.
This is far less than you may have been told previously but it’s all about making sure the search engines know what the content is clearly about but doing this in a natural way.
Any more than 7 and you run the risk of keyword stuffing penalty
The sub topic keywords should be added in no more than once each per article.
Key target phrase
Always look to add a couple of phrases that are powerful and draw immediate attention to the content.
You can identify these triggers by searching on niche related forums, yahoo answers etc. Do a search to find information on your product or service you are creating content for, find out what the biggest problem is that makes your product or service essential and use these triggers in your content.
If you want your content produced to this sort of standard please check out my content marketing service, I provide a wide range of copywriting services at discounted rates
So let’s keep to the dog training theme and assume we are creating content based on a solution to solve dogs biting.
Here is a screen shot of the results for the key phrase
How to stop dogs biting
It’s a competitive keyword with 6 million competing pages and lots of paid ads so it’s got traffic.
Get a feel from browsing the sites listed for the common problems they are solving and any common factors more than a couple of them might be focusing on.
A couple of the sites listed above go with “the top 5 tips” so a good starting point but also identify other common issues that are being covered generally in the content.
This is essential to build your content around.
You should now have a clear overall structure for your content, you have 4 additional keywords that are very relevant to your main keyword and you have identified some sort of common theme which is normally centred on the problem you are solving with your content.
If you are outsourcing your content and there is absolutely nothing wrong with doing so providing you are publishing the highest quality relevant unique content in your own name.
This brief will save you time and money because you should be able to get content delivered that you can use every time not just hope and pray the writer has the gist of your ideas.
Now you have got the content written to the standard you need you now need to ensure it is fully optimised for maximum authority.