Keys to SEO
Fantastic. You’ve just posted something brilliant. But what if no one ever finds it?
Some of the best strategies to be seen and heard on the web are a marketing campaign and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). You probably know what marketing involves, but what is this wily beast, SEO?
To understand SEO, it’s helpful to look at the nature of search engines and how we use them.
And guess how I found current information about SEO? Search engines!
I also emailed my colleague at Platt College, revered instructor Melissa Cabral, to ask her top three tips for SEO. I always go to Melissa when I have a question or problem with WordPress. Always.
Top Tips from Melissa Cabral
- Write relevant content as frequently as possible. This is called Organic SEO. Users want good content, and search engines want to point them there. This is Melissa’s biggest tip.
- Engage and build your loyal followers. Comments, social media shares, subscribers — all these things lead to return visitors, who are more valuable than new visitors who find you through search. A return visitor is more likely to lead to goal conversion.
- Include relevant internal links. When you write new content, think of past content that is relevant and link to it within the new post. This helps users dig deeper into your archives, and creates a “web” of content within your site. External links are great too, but too many bloggers miss the opportunity to get readers digging into their past-posts.
- A well-coded site is critical. If you have any influence on the design or code of the site, a well-coded site gives meaningful structure to the content.
- Use a trusted theme. If you are going the DIY blog route, get the blog theme from a reputable source (for WordPress the best place is wordpress.org!).
- Don’t assume SEO is provided. If you are working with a web professional, don’t assume that SEO is automatically included in the web design services. It is most often a standalone service that can cost even more than the design and development of the website itself. Be a good client by asking lots of questions and clearly outlining project goals, both long term and short term.
What search engines do
- They crawl and scour billions of pages, files, documents, and media on the Internet.
- They build an index of the best results for your search.
How search engines decide if your content is relevant and how it ranks
- It’s no longer a matter of simply searching for the right key words within your post. Density of keywords may actually hinder your ranking and will most likely cause you to write barbaric sentences.
- Hundreds of factors influence the search.
- Popularity is a big factor; search engines assume it means a page or site has valuable information
- Search engines use algorithms to determine value and rank
More Tips
- SEO often involves small modifications, such as providing alt text for images
- Add a transcript for audio and video
- Use key words in titles, text and meta description
- Make key words concrete and specific
- Think about how your users will use search engines and let that guide how you select key words
- Judge the value of your keywords. It’s not about getting more visitors to your site, but about getting the right visitors.
- Place the most important keywords closer to the front of the page or document.
- If you are the webmaster, create a clean, meaningful architecture for your site.
- Use specific keywords to create urls.
- Keep reading to understand Google and Bing guidelines.
Tips from Google
- Market your content, or make sure it gets seen
- Design for users, not for search engines
- Don’t use “cloaking,” which means presenting different information to the search engines than you present to your reader
- Don’t stuff pages with key words
- Design an information-rich site
- Create useful pages with clear, accurate content
- Create human-friendly urls with keywords
- Make titles unique and accurate
- Use the description meta tag
- Optimize the site’s structure
- Make your site easy to navigate
- Write good anchor text
- Optimize images
- Get other sites to link to yours
Tips from Bing
- Make sure your URL structure is clean and keyword rich
- Don’t bury content in rich media, such as Flash and Java Script; make sure rich media doesn’t hide links
- Match keywords in content to what users are searching for
- Create fresh content regularly
- Don’t embed text you want searched in images