SEO has come a long way since the early days of my career. Back then keyword stuffing or writing for robots was the in thing if you wanted your content to rank highly.
Nowadays things are different and we no longer need to prioritize content just for search engines. Modern SEO requires that you please both humans and robots and in the end, you end up with even better content for your target audience.
Natural language processing is one way that Google uses to determine the salience of any content its robots crawl. NLP simply refers to the process by which Google or any other language processing tool tries to understand how entities in a body of content are related to each other.
For the NLP to better understand your content, you need to ensure that it has salience. Salience here refers to the extent to which a piece of content is about an entity. For instance, let’s say you want to write about baking a cake. Your content should mostly focus on the recipe, the ingredients used, the temperature and the time required. The more your content is about the baking of a cake (the more salient it is), the better the NLP will understand it and the more likely it is to rank higher on SERPs.
Tips on Better Content Through NLP
So how do you ensure that your content checks out on salience, is understandable, readable for humans and parsable for robots?
Here are some tips that can come in handy:
- Use short simple sentences and ensure you limit one idea per sentence.
- Connect questions to their answers. Reduce clutter and fluff in your content and don’t ramble on and on.
- Don’t bury the lead. Be specific and get to the point upfront to ensure your audience gets the relevant points then you can go into nuances and details later on. Be clear on the focus of your content upfront then explain it later on.
- Ensure your content has no jargon or marketing-speak. If you work with different clients like I do, you quickly realize they have a hard time explaining what their product does and why their customers should be interested. Part of my job as a digital marketer is to simplify this to make sure their customers understand their products.
- Organize information in your content. One solid piece of content is hard for anyone to digest so break it down with subheadings. Another good idea is to format lists with bullets and numbers to increase readability.
- Avoid grammar and spelling mistakes. They not only make your content sloppy but also hard to read and follow for both robots and humans. So ensure your content is grammatically correct, well spelled and correctly punctuated.
A lot of business owners already have their hands too full running their businesses to give marketing the attention it deserves.
That’s where I come in.
I would love to help you achieve your business goals using my skills and experience as a digital marketer.
Schedule a consultation today and let’s see how we can work together.