Over the past several months I have been reading as many articles on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as I could get my hands on. There are many differing opinions out there on the best way to achieve good SEO. I am going to share my most important findings in this article.
Writing rich content will improve your SEO.
The most important SEO strategy that I found was either not in most of the articles or, in a list of 10 things to improve your SEO was at number 6 to 8 and barely rated a mention. Very few articles cover any aspect of writing the content of your post or page so that it is SEO compliant and keyword rich. Without good content the rest of the SEO is useless or leads to people taking up bad practices to attempt to achieve their desired SEO outcome.
Write for human readers.
When writing the content for your web pages or blog posts, just cover one or two related subjects in an article. Too many topics will confuse your readers. Keep your writing to the point and try not to stray off on some tangent. Write your page or post for a human reader and not for what you think a search engine is looking for in SEO because you will probably be wrong. Try to present your concepts simply so that you will appeal to a larger readership. You never know who is reading your work.
Many of the articles I read spoke about the importance of making your articles keyword rich on the one hand and how, if you are stuffing your pages and posts with too many keywords, your page ranking (PR) would likely fall on the other. My advice would be to forget about search engine optimisation altogether while you are writing your articles.
Write your post or page for the content, as thought you need to pass on information to someone who is on the other side of the planet and their only way of communicating with you is through the information you put on your website. Which in most cases is the truth.
Hone and polish your work.
Whether you are writing content for a page or a post, always write in a wordprocessor and run both spellchecker and grammar checker on your work regularly. Not all grammar checker suggestions will be relevant, however grammar checker can help you to polish your article. Don’t be in a rush to write and post your article. Spend a bit of time honing your content so that it is informative. Remember, you want to provide the other person enough information to get your point across. Also, don’t make your article so long that no one would ever finish it. Give your article a good clear conclusion. Don’t just trail off leaving your reader feeling like they have missed the point.
When you have an article that you are happy with read it out aloud to yourself. You will be surprised at how many minor mistakes you will pick up when you are reading your posts aloud. Then ask someone whose opinion you trust to proof-read your article, not just to read your writing but to read it with a critical eye, and to make suggestions that will improve your work. Consider their suggestions carefully and include any changes that improve your article.
Editing for human readability.
After you have finished your article and edited it several times, go over your work again. This time you are looking for words like “it, they, those” that you can change to more descriptive words. Change pronouns for nouns wherever you are able to and you will be on the way to improving your SEO. Be sure that the changes you make are improving the human readability of your work and not just for the sake of adding better keywords to your article. Search engines will know the difference. Never add keywords that are not relevant to your article just because you think they will improve your SEO.
On page SEO.
Now that you have written your article and improved your keywords you will pull out your ‘on page’ SEO from what you have written. Your ‘on page’ SEO consists of a Title, Keywords and Description meta tags. Title, Keywords and Description meta tags are in the code of the page and as such do not appear on screen. If you are working with programs like WordPress there are plugins to make adding your SEO easy. These tags are to help search engines inform potential readers what your article is about and it’s relevance to their search. This is where you really want to make every word count.
Your title should be as pithy as possible. Make every word count because most search engines use a maximum of 60 characters (chars) for the title meta tag. Below is what your title and title meta tag should look like if you had written this article.
<meta name=“title” content=“A beginners guide to writing SEO compliant keyword rich articles.” />
Title: A beginners guide to writing SEO compliant keyword rich articles.
keywords.
Your keywords need to be the most important words in your article. Many say that keywords meta tags are ignored by search engines. However, that is not true for all search engines so there is no harm in including them. Certainly Google ignores keywords, choosing to find them in the content of your page. Several of the articles I read said that including keywords would not do any harm to your posts and pages PR. Also, by including keywords meta tags on your pages they would be there in the future if keywords became important to search engines again.
The search engines that do use keywords, use a maximum of 1000 chars which is quite a lot. I suggest that you keep your keywords to just the most important ones on your page, say, below 300 chars. One final point on keywords: never add keywords to your keywords meta tag that are not in the content on your page. False keywords will get your page penalised by the search engines.
<meta name=“keywords” content=“beginners, guide, SEO, keyword rich, articles, Search Engine Optimisation, page ranking, related subjects, website, blog, post, keyword, Search Engine, description, content, meta tag, wordpress, plugins,” />
Keywords: beginners, guide, SEO, keyword rich, articles, Search Engine Optimisation, page ranking, related subjects, website, blog, post, keyword, Search Engine, description, content, meta tag, wordpress, plugins,
Description.
Most search engines use a maximum of 160 chars for the description so, as with your title, you will need to use absolutely only the words that best describe your page. The page description is two or three short descriptive sentences, the purpose of which is to entice a potential reader to click your link on the search page. As with all meta tags, don’t introduce new words or concepts that are not on your page.
Even though I would always add a description meta tag to every page, you need to be aware that not all search engines use the meta description all the time. There are times when, instead of the description you so carefully crafted, search engines will show the person searching part of the text on the page or a mix of both depending on what they are searching for.
<meta name=“description” content=“The most important SEO strategy for beginners. How to improve Title, Keywords and Description meta tags on web pages and post to give you better page ranking. Tips to make over your SEO with a larger number of keywords.” />
Description: The most important SEO strategy for beginners. How to improve Title, Keywords and Description meta tags on web pages and post to give you better page ranking. Tips to make over your SEO with a larger number of keywords.
In brief.
● Write your article for human readers first and foremost.
● Edit your page or post to improve your keywords but don’t stuff your article.
● Don’t use keywords that don’t belong in your article.
● Write your Title, Keywords and Description using your article as the source for your meta tags.
● When you are happy that you have polished your article and meta tags publish your post or page and watch your page ranking improve.