SEO (Search Engine Optimized) content writing is one of many writing styles that fall under the category of content writing. Knowing about SEO and SEO practices is essential if you are writing for a website. Otherwise, you would write content that no one would find.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
Before understanding SEO, think about how we access information on the internet. When you want to acquire some information on the internet, you would go to your search engine and look for it isn’t it?
Have you ever thought about the order of the search results?
Why did one search result appear in the top three results while another appeared on the tenth page of Google? (Yes, the 10th page does exist) SEO is the basis for the positions of each result and websites that were properly search-engine optimized properly received higher rankings than websites that were not.
Why you should care about SEO as a content writer?
Let’s say you don’t pay attention to the importance of SEO and decide to ignore all the SEO guidelines. What is going to happen is the search engines won’t have a clue that you exist because you failed to introduce them to who you are and what you have.
SEO is all about ensuring that your content is ready for search engines to share with people and most especially, the search engines can find your content. The search engines won’t know whether to share your content with the rest of the world if you don’t properly optimize it. worthy of being recommended.
So if you want people to find your content through search engines it is vital to optimize your content for search engines.
How can we optimize it?
I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but SEO isn’t something that is particularly simple to master. It is a meticulous process that is constantly evolving. Google monitors more than 200 ranking factors to accurately assess which website pages are properly optimized and which are not.
There are three main aspects to web page optimization, and today we’re going to concentrate on the one that is considered to be the simplest for anyone to implement.
Those three aspects are
- On-Page SEO
- Off-Page SEO
- Technical-SEO
On-page SEO
On-page SEO is defined by its name. It basically involves changing some “On-Page” elements to improve optimization. On-page SEO includes title tags, meta descriptions, heading structure, content, image optimization, accessibility, and overall website performance ( We going to learn how to do these later on. Don’t worry, there aren’t intimidating as they sound)
Off-page SEO
When you change an element that is not “On” the page to optimize it, it falls under Off-Page SEO. Building backlinks, being active on social media, and guest blogging are all examples of this.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO refers to website and server optimizations that make it easier for search engine spiders to crawl and index your site. Since they are technical things, they fall under technical SEO.
How you can On-Page SEO
Always write for humans. Not For Search Engines.
Were you planning to go above and beyond to satisfy the search engines so you could obtain those high positions in Google results? Yeah, right!
The goal of Google’s SEO algorithms is to deliver results that are valuable to people, so if you want to succeed with search engines, you must first succeed with people Just do your best to bring value to readers and make that the heart of your SEO strategy.
Choose a focus keyword
A focus keyword is a word or phrase that you anticipate your potential readers will use to search for the content you are writing. Let’s assume you are writing about German Shepherd dogs, then the focus keyword would be “Geman Sheperd Dogs”. Whenever someone searches for “German Shepherd Dogs” in a search engine, the search engine will know your blog is relevant to that search inquiry because of your focus keyword.
Optimize your URL slug.
How do search engines know what your blog’s focus keyword is? That’s why we have URL slugs to help us with that.
URL slug is the last part of your URL. We add our focus keyword to the URL slug to tell the search engines what our page is about and that’s just the first step.
To completely optimize an URL, it’s critical to make your URLs short, clear,
and meaningful as well.
Use the focus keyword in the first 100 words.
Including your focus keyword in the URL isn’t enough; you’ll also need to use it once in the first 100-150 words of your blog.
Will that convince the search engines what your focus keyword is? The answer is, nope.
Keyword Density
This step will help the search engine determine what is the focus word of your content. To explain what is keyword density, it’s the number of times a keyword appears on a specific webpage and it’s usually represented as a ratio or percentage of the total word count.
Try to keep the keyword density above 1% but below 2% at all times which means if you write 100 words, try to make one of them the focus keyword.
Add Outbound links
Outbound links, also known as External links, are hyperlinks that take the reader to another source of information from your page. Outbound links to related domains will help Google understand the subject of your page and will demonstrate to Google that your page offers good value to your readers.
Optimize your meta title and meta description
The meta title is basically the title of your post when it’s going to appear on the search results page.
To optimize the meta title, keep them short and do not add any clickbait-ish titles. Make sure they align with your content as well.
Meta descriptions are the description below your meta title and John Muller has stated that descriptions aren’t a ranking factor.
Even though meta descriptions aren’t used for SEO, it’s better to learn how to write engaging and captivating meta descriptions because it does play a role in a user clicking on your meta title.
Optimize all the heading tags on your page.
Header tags, also known as heading tags, are used on websites to differentiate headings and subheadings. They go from H1 to H6. The lower the number, the more important and significant the heading is.
Why are these important? because they establish a structure to your post and the readers can distinguish the importance of each point consequently. Not only that, but they also have an impact on SEO. You need to use them correctly or the search engines will become confused, resulting in lower SEO.
How to optimize the H1 tag: This is only reserved for the title of your page and make sure to include your focus keyword in this.
How to optimize the H2 to H6 tags: Use these appropriately to establish a hierarchy of importance for your points since they are subheadings.
Rename your images.
Try to upload pictures with names that are clear and describe what the picture is about.
If the image of your german shepherd is named 12412442.jpg, go ahead and rename it to something like GermanShepard.jpg before uploading it.
Add alt texts to images.
Alternate text (alt text) explains an image on a web page. It is stored in the HTML code and is usually not viewable on the page.
Millions of people with visual impairments must use a screen reader in order to access online content. Their screen readers will be able to give them a descriptive explanation of the content they are reading when you have given an alt text for each image.
Additionally, these alt texts would aid Google in understanding the subject matter of your page, which is beneficial for SEO.
Compressing images to make the website faster
It’s important to get the image file size right because it can significantly affect how quickly your page will load. Image compressing is basically making your images smaller in size without losing the quality.
Aim for the WEBP whenever possible because, as the above image shows, it can reduce the size of an image without compromising its quality.
There you have it!
Now that you are aware of the value of SEO, you can perform a beginner-friendly on-page SEO procedure. Don’t forget to use these techniques when writing!
