For the last two years, I have been employed by a terrific, little staffing agency in the Pacific Northwest, Steyer Associates (I worked for them during my assignment at Bing). They recently asked a select few, key contributors on their staff to write up a post for the Steyer website. When they asked me, I chose to create a Top 10 list – hey, everyone loves a Top 10 list! Can you say “link bait?”
Steyer Associates focuses their staff placement services on providing top-notch content development resources, ranging from basic end user to IT Pro, from technical editing to technical and programming writing (for software development kits, aka SDKs), from program & project management to instructional design, from discrete, short assignments to ongoing, long-term placements. They offer a variety of great opportunities for top-end writers, editors, and PMs, and Steyer’s clientele get excellent results. Best of all, Marty Steyer treats his people with a level of respect and generosity that is rarely seen in staffing agencies.
Before I joined the team, search engine optimization (SEO) had not been a technical specialty in the Steyer Associates portfolio. So to help promote their website with unique content, I decided to contribute a whitepaper on the top 10 things content developers need to know about SEO. I figured that was a relevant topic to the theme of the Steyer site, to their resource pool staff, and to their customers!
My new whitepaper, appropriately titled, Top 10 SEO considerations for web content developers, identifies the most important SEO issues that a content developer typically controls. It also offers detailed recommendations on what to do for each issue to help optimize the web content for search.
To offer a tantalizing taste of what is covered, my paper discusses the following 10 content author-based optimization recommendations:
- Develop a list of targeted keywords for each webpage
- Write unique, keyword-rich <title> tag text
- Write compelling <meta> description text
- Write webpage-contextual <img> alt text
- Write descriptive, keyword-rich <h1> tag text
- Create lower level heading tags if necessary
- Write an adequate amount of crawlable body text
- Create inline links to other relevant webpages
- Write descriptive, keyword-rich anchor text for links
- Ignore the <meta> keyword tag (unless you have nothing else to do)
Want to know more? To see the details discussion and recommendations on all of these items, download and read the Top 10 SEO considerations for web content developers whitepaper, available for free from Steyer Associates.
One last thing: in anticipation of a potential question or two, please note that the photo on the cover page is definitely not of me. In case anyone is interested (and heaven knows why you would be!), my photo can be seen on my new Google Profile page or my old LinkedIn page. Enjoy the read! 
