At the core of any successful brand is a variety of elements. Most notably, quality content plays a role in ensuring that people find value in your website and continue to come back for more. However, not all content creators have figured out the secrets of great content: this can result in consistently poor performance for many blogs, brands and businesses.

To rise above the occasion requires an understanding of the fundamentals of good content. As it turns out, there is more of a blueprint to the process than many realize. Let’s take a look today at the core fundamentals of building better content, all of which can be implemented immediately to deliver better results.

Meaningful Headlines

The first thing that anybody will see from your latest post or article is the headline. In order to truly attract the most attention, you need the best headlines possible. By using action-oriented words and broader phrases that allude to – but do not totally reveal – the information in the article, you can maximize the number of people who’ll read and ultimately share your content. It should go without saying however that using misleading headlines will backfire and basically results in pinging noise at audiences.

Keyword Choice

In order to ensure your content is optimized and ready for indexing by search engines, you need to imply context. While search engines have become very good at recognizing the content of articles, it is crucial that you use keywords to better define that context. Search engines do not condone keyword stuffing – blatantly aggressive and excessive usage of keywords and phrases – but casual usage sprinkled throughout each piece of content will better assist in ranking for select SERPs.

Solid Copy

With respect to SEO and marketing, content is king. While you can dress up any post or piece of content with flashy headlines, images and other elements, a solid body copy is crucial to good performance. Each piece of content must be well-written, informative and ultimately relevant to a particular audience. If you make the primary goal in content creation about delivering content that people will enjoy, most of the rest will naturally fall into place.

Visuals

For any content to be successful, it should maximize its appeal by offering multiple types of media. While blog posts can be informative and entertaining without any additional elements, adding the occasional image or video can help further drive a point home. It also helps break up the monotony of longer forms of content that might be otherwise result in people losing interest due to short attention spans.

Supplemental Info

Last but not least, any good piece of content will have sources that back up claims or provide additional clarification. In most forms of content creation, this will manifest in the form of citations or links that point to other websites. This is not only helpful to readers but it additionally will build cloud with search engines.

If you include these five building blocks in your content creation plan, then you’ll be sure to avoid pinging noise at your audience and will instead deliver great content that resonates. Whether the goal is to increase engagement, boost shares or build backlinks, following this advice will help you achieve it.