Whether you are creating your own content for marketing purposes or working with an content marketing service such as eVisible, the steps that your content takes between the first draft and being published are critical. It’s in this process where you can fine tune your language, be more concise with your editing and ensure that you are hitting all of your key points. The difference between a good piece of content and a great piece of content often comes in the editing and revision process.

Here are a few things to keep in mind as you review your content after the first draft but before it goes live to the world:

Read the Draft Out Loud: Reading your work out loud — even to yourself — will give you a better understanding about how the text flows and if it has the right tone. In addition, reading out loud is a great way to catch typos (such as missing or misused words) that might slip through while re-reading it on paper.

Use the Proper Amount of Keywords: Just like Goldilocks, you want to find a balance of keywords in your content that is “just right” — enough that is impacts your organic search engine results but not so much that it begins to seem overstuffed (which can lead to your content being marked as spam by Google). A good rule of thumb is to aim for about 75 words of text for every keyword phrase used.

Get an Outside Perspective: It’s very easy for you to become insular when dealing with your own content. After you’ve written and edited a piece of copy enough times, it can become difficult to tell if it’s good or not. The best way to solve this problem is to have someone from outside your organization read your content. This will give you a different perspective from someone who can tell you if the writing connects with an “outsider.”

Use Image Alt Tags: One of the most important things you can do with your content from an SEO perspective is to make sure you are using Image Alt tags. This is the code inside of an image tag that will display if an image will not load on a person’s screen for whatever reason. Search engines such as Google consider it a positive for images to have alt image text.

Aggressively Promote Social Media Sharing: After you’ve created great content, you want your readers to share it with friends and co-workers. So make it easy for them to do this! Make sure that your content has sharing “buttons” to let people quickly share your stories to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or other relevant social media sites. You can also optimize your content for social media sharing by coding in Open Graph tags and Twitter Cards.