The basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are crucial for several reasons. SEO brings in organic traffic, which means it's FREE. If done well, SEO can establish your brand's expertise in your field. Now, what is SEO and how do you do it? Picture a librarian trying to shelve the newest book. Where should it go and how is someone supposed to find it? SEO optimizes an online article where a search engine is able to find it.
We get more questions about SEO than anything else. It seems like a hard thing to understand when it isn't. Just doing a few simple basics of SEO can make a huge difference in organic traffic to your company site. Let's go back to the library we talked about in the introduction. You have a book (your post) that needs to be cataloged so others can read it. The librarian needs to be able to put it on the shelf: and then be able to find it when someone wants to check it out. Your goal is to make that as easy as possible. The easier you make it for your post to be found, the more people (traffic) it will bring to your site.
SEO l noun
Search-engine optimization: the methods used to boost the ranking or frequency of a website in results returned by a search engine, in an effort to maximize user traffic to the site.
Tip #1 - It's all about a quality headline
The headline should be one of the main focuses of your post. The headline will tell our readers what to expect and will direct the search engines to your content. In later posts, we will go over more specifics about long-tail vs. short-tail keywords and how to focus your title on a niche.
Tip #2 - Keywords
Keywords are crucial for your post's ranking success. SEO Keywords (also known as “keywords” or “keyphrases”) are terms added to online content in order to improve search engine rankings for those terms.
Keywords are basic SEO tools that search engines to categorize and rank your site. Imagine the library again; you write a new cookbook focusing on recipes for vegetables from a home garden in the Northeast. You will have to pick a title that accurately describes your content while making it match the niche you're book is covering. You might choose "Cooking Recipes for the Northeastern Home Gardner." In this example, a librarian would categorize your book by title and easily find it for a reader.
Tip #3 - Quality
The best SEO won't make up for a boring post. If you create quality content; that reliably develops your title and keywords, readers will stay on the site longer. Remember, Google and most search engines look at how long a reader stays on a website. The longer a reader stays, the better the search engines think your post is. The second thing search engines look at is a post's length. The best length for a blog post is 1000 to 2000 words. They like well-written, longer posts that people will spend more time reading. While we prefer shorter-length posts, under a five-minute read for busy people, we will have one to two longer, between 1000 to 2000 words posts each month.
Sometimes the basics are the best
Remember these three basic SEO tips; they will make your material easy to catalog and find for Search Engines. You can do that through titles, keywords, and relevant quality content. Keep a look out for our longer SEO post coming out soon!