SEO or Search Engine Optimization is an essential tool in calling in traffic to your content – to have it rise above others on search engines such as Google or Bing. Most of the internet’s traffic is directed by such search engines, and thus, SEO is the know-how of mastering marketing in the modern tech-driven world.
Studies have revealed that 95% of clicks are received by those on the first page of google and SEO is optimally directing the algorithm to work in your favour by improving ranking and driving a higher quantity of quality visitors to a website. These search engines suggest the top websites based on the relevancy and authority of the webpages crawled and included into their web index.
Search engine optimization requires technical knowledge as well as creativity. It ensures a website is accessible and technically sound while simultaneously making certain that the content being provided is useful and high-quality, one that serves the user.
SEO largely makes use of smart words – where how a site is using words that people search or type into the search bar of an engine like google. SEO may sound taxing, or perhaps even a little hazy at this point, but there are small, constructive steps to effectively do Search Engine Optimization:
STEP ONE: RESEARCH
This is the single-most vital part of SEO. In fact, the majority of optimization relies on research itself. Once done correctly, any content created by the key insights of the research is bound to exponentially grow its viewership. Since SEO focusses largely on the user base, research must be put into recognizing user patterns. Breaking the research on user pattern down, there are 4 key factors that must be looked into altering your content patterns –
- Keywords: There are many websites for keyword optimization. Keyword optimization is about opting for the most common search words that are relevant to the content. Often the same terminology is used inter-changeable in a different sequence or similar words. Such optimization ensures that the keywords used as a title or subtitle to the content include the common-most terms that drive internet traffic.
Examples of Keyword Optimizing sites are SEMRush and Ahrefs.
- Length: Readers have certain expectations every time they click a link. Most similar content will have similar structures and length. Thus, the chosen keywords are often associated with certain lengths. One person searching a certain word XYZ may expect to see a short review while another searching for ABC would be seeking an elaborate article. Researching on the length of an article based on the optimized keyword is just as important to guarantee viewer satisfaction.
SEO Rambler is a great free tool to gain insight into SEO-based lengths. Each article to be written should be around the numbers of words mentioned on the top 3 results of the tool.
- Type/Category: Researching on type or category of a content is very similar to researching on length. Each keyword when looked upon on google will show similar results. To ensure searchers get content they want, each piece of work should cater to a certain type that is relevant to the chosen optimized keyword in the first step. Unlike keyword optimization and length, one does not need a tool to figure out the type.
All you need to do is to search the chosen keywords into Google’s search bar, the search results listicles give a good enough idea of the content that is needed.
- Analysis: The internet is filled with content in today’s world. People generally do not have the time to read through multiple articles. Often times, they don’t even read one. All searchers want is to get their answer as quickly as possible based on the search. As a consequence, Google created a ‘People Also Ask’ section with multiple related questions and a gist of the content answering that specific question. When targeting a larger audience based on SEO, target the ‘People Also Ask’ section is just as important.
When writing an article, the target should be to answer as many of these questions relevant to your keyword as possible.
Once researched the keyword, length, type and the list of contents for your piece of writing, the article generated is thus an SEO-friendly content ready to generate an increment in viewership.
The content is now completely ready.
THE NEXT STEP?
Even though your content is largely optimized now, a few minor tweaks here and there that often go unnoticed can also be used to improve your work even further.
- Titles: The titles are of two types – The Post Title and The Meta Title. The Post Title refers to the title that the readers see on the website whereas The Meta title refers to the one that shows up on the search engine.
It is of utmost importance to use optimized keywords in a meta-title, otherwise search engines will only reflect on the post title as meta-titles.
Post titles should always be less than 66 characters – short, crispy and fun.
- Descriptions: Just like titles, there are also post meta descriptions that are on search engines. These post descriptions should be as attractive and enticing as possible. Very similar to sales, this is the piece of branding that will draw viewership in as it is the first words impressed into the minds of the viewers.
A meta description should ideally be 156 characters long.
- Image Alt Texts:Most content writers and websites would engage their audience with related visuals. It naturally attracts viewership and is easy on the eyes. Thus, when adding images to your posts, adding image alt attributions or texts are just as important. Irrespective to being visually appealing, the attributions play a huge role in SEO since search engines also read into the alt texts and image file names.
This optimization increases the chances of the webpage’s visibility in the ‘Images’ section of a search engine. Most website-hosting platforms provide the option to optimize alt text based on keywords whereas the name of image file should be optimized before uploading the file.
Other than text, images can also be optimized via changing their size dimensions. High resolution photos should be toned down and reduced to ensure that a web page loads conveniently without losing the purpose of the image. Sizing pixels improves the ease of accessing a webpage as well as loading it faster on search engines.
- Interlinks/Anchors:Interlinks and anchors allow old posts to be attached to new posts. This keep viewers from staying and reading just a little more on your website before leaving. Instead of just increasing this bounce rate, it also increases the SEO ranking of a webpage. Some plugins and tools allow automation of this process such as SEO Smart Links or Yoast plugins.
- Permalinks: A permalink, by default, is based on the title of an article. Most website-creator platforms also allow altering these permalinks. SEO is not only about adding optimized keywords but also about removing the ones that are not required. Words like ‘a’, ‘an’, ‘the’, ‘to’ and many more common ones are often ignored by search engines, and should be removed from the permalink.
- Headings: SEO also involved heading tags. Proper use of H1, H2 and H3 heading tags also improves a post’s ranking by the use of keywords. A title, by default, uses an H1 heading.For every other sub-heading should be tagged H2 and consecutively, tagged H3. These tags in the content should be keyword optimised to make extensive use of SEO
Content creators, freelancers, and companies most often do not just need to provide high-quality content but also must be masters of marketing. SEO can cause a drastic increment in viewership and ensure your ideas reach to a high number of quality organic consumers. Although Search Engine Optimization at first may seem like a hefty task to undertake, but is a skill that can be mastered in no time.