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One of the most difficult things a blogger and website builder has to achieve is the balancing act between creating engaging content that’s also optimized for search engine ranking.  If you don’t have great content, you’ll never develop a loyal readership who are likely to promote you to their network of social media friends.  But if you fail to follow the basic SEO principles, people may never find your website in the first place because you won’t rank in search engine results pages.

It’s a tricky balancing act and anyone who’s decided I want to build my own website will know it can take months of practice and tweaking before you get the balance right.  So that’s why we want to save you the headache of trial and error and give you 5 secrets to writing engaging content with high search engine ranking.

1.  Create Value for Your Visitors

Before you even think about optimizing your content you need to ensure you’re writing engaging posts that your readers simply can’t live without.  Whatever niche you’re targeting, give them something of real value they won’t find elsewhere.

For example, if you’re an expert in tax accounting, why not give your readers top tips on how to save thousands on their tax bill.  Or you might be good at writing in a satirical style, putting a different slant on the news that gives your readers their daily dose of humor.  Or finally you might have the latest information on gadgets that tech enthusiasts would be dying to read.  These ideas would give real value to your website visitors and sure to bring them back time and again.

Creating content your readers value is vital for ensuring you build external links to your website.  People will only want to share your content if it will also add value to their friends and colleagues.  When visitors share your content through their social media networks, these external links also help to boost your search engine ranking success.  For more information, this article has 10 Secrets to Linkbaiting and Why Your Blog Depends on it.

2.  Keyword Density

The frequency of your keywords and phrases is also important.  If you’ve decided I want to build my own website, you’ll need to practice incorporating your keywords naturally into your content.   One of the biggest mistakes new bloggers make is adding too many keywords that stick out from the text and interrupt the flow and reader enjoyment.

When people use the internet, searching for something is still the most common reason for being online, and search engines recognize this.  That’s why you need to spoon feed them and give them exactly what they’re looking for.  When it comes to keywords, the density should be between 3 and 5%, which roughly means around 4 times per 500 words.  Anything over 5.5% can reduce your ranking dramatically as search engines exclude your site for overuse of keywords.  They believe your content may be weak and purely a string of keywords to try to fool the search engines.

3.  Keyword Placement

Anyone who has the experience to say, “I can build my own website” will know there really aren’t any hard and fast rules to SEO.  In fact, the world of SEO is constantly changing and keyword placement is no exception.  However there are a few simple tried and tested guidelines you can follow to help improve your search engine ranking:

• The main keyword phrase should appear in the title and the first sentence of the opening paragraph
• Add your keyword phrase to at least one subheading
• Finally add your keyword phrase to the last paragraph

And don’t forget, above all make sure your content still has a natural flow and is engaging to your readers.  There’s no point optimizing bad content!

4.  Always Use Your Keywords In The Title Tag

The title tag is the headline that will be displayed on the search engine results page.  It has two very important functions.  First, because this is what searchers will see on the results page you need to make sure it entices them to click on your site and not others.

You also need to include your keyword phrase in your title, preferably near the beginning, as search engines use the title as part of the ranking process.   They want searchers to see clearly that they’re providing relevant results, so the keyword should always be in the page title.

5.  Learn to Build My Own Website Using Audience Language

You may be an authority in your field but you still need to do your keyword research to find out the type of phrases your audience actually use to search for your content.  There are a number of free tools you can use, such as Google’s free Keyword Tool , which allows you to search for keywords in any field.  Make sure you choose keyword phrases that are easy to spell, simple and have a good number of searches, without throwing yourself into the most competitive keywords on the internet .

When it comes to search engine optimization and the use of keywords to boost your search engine ranking, once again it’s important to remember that content is king.  There’s no point optimizing poor content, because you simply won’t keep your readers and encourage anyone to create links to your website.  This article gives you more ideas on How To Engage Your Readers With Compelling Content.