Over the previous few years, the rules governing effective SEO have altered more than significantly.

The keen online marketer and the valid SEO company are now upping their investments into content generation, but they will also have to invest some time into acquiring knowledge over the new rules that govern applicable SEO practices. Those days where driving traffic to a website simply by packing headlines full of keywords are no longer applicable, and new SEO strategies revolve around a different format: User experience.

According to Moz Inc., the Seattle-based company that specializes in SEO, the key ingredients that govern SEO for 2016 will be made up of mobile-friendly tactics, the analysis of a webpage’s perceived value, user dwelling time, as well as the readability and the design of the site.

On the other hand, the same agency stated that decreasing factors will include paid link and anchor text effectiveness.

Here, we consider 4 tips on how SEO can be used in order to maximize content marketing investments.

1. It’s all about the intention.

Exact keywords in terms of offering relevant search results are no longer so important. In days gone by, the click was all-important. But now, search engines focus on how people interact with your website: Do they find the answers they are searching for on your site, or are they clicking the Back button?

So, these days, it’s about activity post-click. You have to get the clicks, and you also have to satisfy the intent of the searcher.

2. It’s not all about the keywords.

The inclusion of keywords within the headlines are less important. After all, Google is now more keyed up on interpreting the overall meaning of a webpage and a website.

Not long ago, if you wished to rank for “best sport rims for Shelby GT” you would have had to mention those same keywords a number of times within the body of the page’s text as well as in the headline. Of course, it’s useful to mention “best sport rims for Shelby GT,” though the semantic meaning is now of far greater importance. Now you can discuss sport auto rims and the search engines, particularly Google, will pick that up.

Historically, it was pivotal to have the main keywords within the body copy and also in the meta description. This is now out the window. While search engines become smarter, they are considering alternative wordage that will most likely be in the article. Things such as what it is that signals the article to be authoritative and on topic.

Some 75 percent of queries made in search engines are three to five words in length, and that means your headlines ought to be written accordingly. Search engines, or at least the guys who craft the algorithms, have figured out that when people make a single or double word search, they very rarely achieve the results they are looking for.

Thus, to ascertain quality results which pertain to the actual answer, they now have to utilize three words or more within the query. As a content creator, whenever you are considering optimization, you must take this into account.

3. Focus wholly on user experience.

With this in mind, original content is far more important than at any time in the past. The more depth of original content, be that a video, an image, or be that lengthy text content, anything and everything that will magnetize a website visitor into reading through and/ or sharing that content, the better it will be.

Your content must be original and fully targeted at your intended audience. Nevertheless, curation of content is still valuable. If you do curate content by taking a paragraph or two from another website, provide that other site with full credit and attribution. Then, you add in a paragraph or two with respect to your own thoughts, and this provides something of a journalistic voice, in which case, the content becomes your own.

4. Size truly matters.

On average, longer articles that reach in excess of 1,000 words perform in superior fashion in search. Just two or three years back, a 300-word article was plenty long enough. But these days, it’s the longer articles that are seeing more traffic, and thus, the rankings are higher in search, particularly so for the more competitive terms.

But do break up longer form content with subheadings, bullet points, and images where possible as this makes for an easier read.