If you have ever written anything online for a personal website or a business, there’s a really good chance that someone was yapping in your ear about “SEO”. You’ve heard things like “Google doesn’t like keyword stuffing!” and “Make sure you put ALT tags on all your images!” and “Your title tag needs to be informative, keyword-rich and easily readable by your visitor!”
If you’re just interested in writing, damnit!, there’s a good chance that you let those phrases and acronyms go in one ear and out the other.
I’m here to tell you – you should pay attention. Here’s an easy explanation of why you should care about the mysterious, all-powerful “SEO”, and what to do about it.
So What the Heck is SEO!?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Helpful, yes? Probably not. SEO is the practice of writing content and building a website (structurally) that will make it as easy as possible for search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Ask and MSN to find, index (i.e. remember) and regurgitate your content when someone types search terms (keywords!) that relate to your content.
Get it?
Why do I care about it?
You only care about SEO if you care that someone can find your website by typing in words related to your website at Google, MSN, etc. So if you have a website – maybe for a business, or a blog you want others to find – you may want to look into this fancy SEO stuff. I’ll lay out some best practices below to get you started. This isn’t exactly a comprehensive guide to make you an SEO ninja, but at the very least it’ll keep you from making the big mistakes and headed in the right direction.
How do I get started?
First of all, I’d recommend looking closely at what you want from SEO. Do you want to be in the top 30 results when someone searches for “easy kid recipes”, or “blog giveaways”? Figure out what your content is about, and what keywords you think folks might use to get to your site. You can try the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to figure out which keywords might be related to what you come up with. Typically, you’ll want to focus on 5-10 keywords, and maybe 10-30 ‘halo keywords’ — keywords that are related but not necessarily the primary things someone might use to find your content.
Once you know what your keywords will be, you can start optimizing.
What will make the most impact?
Ever heard of the 80/20 rule? 80% of your results in SEO will come from 20% of your total effort. There are a few things you can do to really make an impact with SEO. Everything else might help, but your ‘money-makers’ are the ones I’ll list below.
Write Consciously
When you write new content for your site, try to keep the keywords in mind and use them where it feels natural. Don’t force it; it’ll make your writing read like crap and ultimately won’t help your SEO much. What you’re mostly concerned about is keyword density. According to Wikipedia (and a bunch of other articles on the web), a recommended keyword density is around 1-3%. That means that of all the content on your site, 1-3% should be actual keywords. The rest should just be great, relevant content.
Write Useful, Keyword-rich Titles
On most websites, the title of your post or page directly relates to the title tag for that page. A title tag is a piece of information that appears in the code of your website that tells search engines what the title of the page is. If you are using an SEO plugin on your WordPress website, you may have changed the settings, so it’s worth taking a look to make sure you’re set up properly. I’d recommend setting it up so that your page or post titles are the title tags, probably with your site name appended. So, for Aiming Low, it might look something like this for this post:
“WTF is SEO?! – Aiming Low”
Here are some best practices for your post titles:
- Each title should be unique
- Each title should contain keywords that relate directly to the post content
- Each title should avoid acronyms – when in doubt, spell it out!
- In your theme, your post titles should be listed within an H1 tag on the single post pages (i.e. the page that shows just that post and no others). Contact a web developer or geek if you don’t know!
Want to know what not to do?
- Don’t stuff your titles with unnecessary keywords or make it unreadable to the user.
- Don’t use acronyms – spell it out for your readers and search engines. Don’t assume that they know what you’re talking about!
- Don’t use a title that has nothing to do with the content of your post
Does some of this sound like common sense writing? I sure hope so. A lot of the things you’ll do to make your site SEO friendly are the same things you’d do to make your site readable, useful and interesting to your visitors.
Link to Relevant Content
I won’t get started on the nofollow linking debate here. One of the most critical components of your SEO strategy will be linking. That means two things:
- Getting other sites to link to you (that usually comes with having good connections and good content)
- Linking back to relevant content on your own site
It’s tough to control who links to you; link exchange programs are usually scams, and not a great idea. When Google finds a link to your site on another website, they consider not only the length of time the link has existed and the content that is being linked, but the PageRank of the site linking to you as well as the relevance of that site’s content to your content. That all contributes to the amount of authority a link provides your site.
You can control links on your own site. When writing new content, try to link back to older posts that may hold relevance. If you are on a company website, make sure your blog links back frequently to product pages and company profiles and general information. For the sake of your readers, link to relevant resources that may not exist on your site. If that pains you, write a new resource yourself and link to that! Just don’t go scraping someone else’s content, m’kay?
Provide descriptions for your website, pages and posts
If your platform allows for it, provide the following whenever possible. Google may not use them right away, or at all – but if a search engine does display it, it means the difference between what can be a useful search result for your visitor or a random excerpt from your page that may or may not be relevant and grab their attention.
- General site description, i.e Meta Description (this can be done in the settings of many themes and platforms)
- Page descriptions (for WordPress, a plugin is usually needed for this unless your theme provides it. Blogger folks are out of luck – other platforms, it depends!)
- Post descriptions (ditto the above)
Here’s an example of a great description that tells the searcher exactly what they’ll be clicking on and what the site is:
Descriptions should be short – like, tweet-length short! – and descriptive. Duh. Again, try to get some keywords in there!
Add ALT Tags to Images
A search engine can’t read an image (YET) – so if you have an image on your site that is relevant to your content (we hope it would be!) you want to set what’s called an ALT tag so that a search engine can see that there’s an image – and know what the image is about.
Depending on what you use to update your site content, there may be something in the editor where you insert images that allows you to simply type an image title or ALT tag. In WordPress, it’s super simple. In Blogger, though, you’ll have to do a little work in HTML view. Look at the highlighted portions of the image below – the text highlighted is the text you would have to add manually after clicking on the HTML tab.
Blogger makes it difficult to add image ALT tags
Those of you on WordPress have it easier – just fill out this box when you insert an image:
That’s all for now
That’s a good start! If you can get those things going for you, your site will do a bit better on search engines. Remember, a lot of your performance on a search engine has to do with these major factors, too:
- Your niche
- Your content
- Whether your site is valued by others (links to your site, for example)
- Age (how long your site has been around)
Google is even starting to incorporate what sort of links you receive – bad publicity isn’t always good anymore!
Got Questions?
Ask them in the comments. I’ll try to answer you, or get you to someone who can!
About MommyGeek
omg my brain hurts but that was hella informative-thanks!!! :)
Twitter Name: demip90x
Although a lot of it was common sense, this was a really handy all-in-one cheat sheet. Really excellent guidance. Thanks!!!
Twitter Name: joannaguerra
Wait, if SEO doesn’t stand for “Stop Exaggerating, Oprah!” I’ve been sending donations to the wrong company.
Twitter Name: debontherocks
Ouchie. SEO is harrrrrd. I’m on Blogger and I’m slowly facing up to the idea that I might have to switch.
I’d rather be drawing.
Twitter Name: littleanimation
Amazing intro to SEO! You explained it clearly without all the jargon SEO pros seem to use when explaining. I knew most of this already, but I’m going to share this post with my sister who just started a travel blog! Thank you on her behalf, in advance!
Twitter Name: cartooninperson
Thank you for a very helpful, informative post! Aiming Low is such an exemplary blog… as informative as it is hilarious!
On my mom blog, I’m afraid our biggest keywords are all bodily fluids or functions! LOL
Twitter Name: 18Years2Life
This is GREAT! Am bookmarking and am planning to read it in more detail this evening!
Twitter Name: mummyinprovence
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Hi MommyGeek,
I provide SEO consultant services and what you have outlined here is an excellent description of what SEO really means to anyone that is contributing content to the web. At this point, Google frowns upon keyword stuffing, and that should be avoided. The key here is “optimization” but not “over optimization” GREAT post!! Thanks for sharing!