How To Write SEO And How It Can Help You Find Readers

SEO How It Can Help You

What is SEO? It might sound technical, but search engine optimization (SEO) is relatively easy to understand. Let’s look at how to write SEO for authors.

You apply a set of practices when you write articles or posts on your blog or website to help people find them.

You write, and a lot of your writing will be published online. SEO-friendly writing helps you tell search engines where readers can find your articles.

Search engines act like huge libraries. They categorize and index almost every page on the Internet and then suggest pages to answer people’s search queries.

How SEO works

Let’s say you write a new article about how to open a coconut.

Google will crawl your site, and it will index your article.

Then when someone searches for an answer to “How do I open a coconut?”, Google will suggest the best pages on the subject, and hopefully, it will include the page or post on your site.

how a google search works

But if there are already one thousand pages that can answer the question, will your page be indexed at number one or one thousand for the search query?

Learning how to write SEO can make a difference in how high or low your page appears in Google searches.

Ideally, you would like your new blog post or piece of content to appear on the first page of Google.

But that is unlikely to happen unless you understand the basics of how to write SEO and optimize your website or blog and every new page you add.

Getting a high position or ranking on Google or Bing search engine results pages (SERPS) depends on your SEO efforts.

Search engines use many ranking factors to differentiate between high-quality, relevant content and poor content. There are three major parts to SEO: Reputation, On-page SEO, and Off-page SEO.

 

1. Your SEO ranking and reputation

Google has an acronym for its most important ranking factors. E.A.T. It stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

Over time, Google ranks your site on these three factors. It is why new websites perform poorly at first and why more established sites rank much higher.

The amount of search traffic you get to your site and individual pages on your website depends heavily on how you rank for these factors.

Expertise is relatively easy. Be an expert in your field, and stay on topic in all of your articles and posts.

If your blog is about writing, create content that keeps to subjects directly related to the process of writing.

For example, you could use point of view, first-person writing, line editing, literary devices, or how to become a content writer.

Authority is not as easy.

You gain it by the number of other websites that link to your site. These are called backlinks. The more authority these sites have, the more it improves your site’s authority.

Many people try to use link-building schemes to help this factor. However, most of the practices are frowned upon and don’t work.

In SEO speak, these schemes and tricks are called black hat SEO, which is a bit like saying it’s cheating.

 

Use white hat practices

The opposite is white hat, which is good SEO practice.

The best way to build your authority is to be patient and wait for it to happen.

Sites link to high-quality content to add expertise or support to their articles. If you write well, this will happen over time. Quality links will attract more traffic to your website.

One way you can nudge it along is to have a clear reuse policy on your site. It can help remind people to link to your articles.

The last factor, trust, is totally under your control.

If your site is spammy or has links on the homepage to poor-quality sites or any other unsavory subject, it will lose trust.

You can also lose trust by writing clickbait post titles that have little or no relevance to your content.

Another way to lose trust is when you do not label paid content or advertising on your site.

As your reputation becomes more evident and more established to search engines, you will see a steady improvement in your organic traffic.

Summary:

1. Become an expert and make sure your articles are always on topic. 

2. Be patient, and wait for backlinks. They will come in time.

3. Keep your site honest and respect your visitors.

2. On-Page SEO optimization

On-page or technical SEO works by inserting structured data to improve your search engine rank.

When you write a new article, you need to give clear signals because Google and Bing want to know where to file it. In other words, you need to write SEO language that search engines understand.

You do this with keywords. Keyword research has become almost a science for large companies and corporations.  But you do not need to go to that extreme.

All you need to do is use a short two or three-word phrase that accurately describes your new article.

A keyword phrase is called a long-tail keyword, and it should ideally contain only nouns, verbs, or adjectives. Avoid prepositions, auxiliaries, and linking words, as these are not highly relevant to search engines.

If your article is about how to write from a third-person perspective in fiction, your keywords could be third-person writing, third-person omniscient, or third-person point of view.

Once you decide on your keyword phrase, you need to add it, word for word, in the following places in your article. These are often called title tags and meta descriptions.

Keyword locations:

a. In your title.

b. In the first two sentences of your text.

c. In your title tag

d. In your meta description

But only use it once in each place.

Search engines look in these locations when they crawl your pages.

By finding the same short phrase in each place, they recognize that it is your keyword and describes the main topic of your article.

 

Avoid keyword stuffing

If you add your keyword phrase too often in your text, it is called keyword stuffing.

Keyword stuffing is black hat, and even if it occurs by accident or inattention, it will result in your page being ranked very low or even ignored by Google.

Sometimes it is difficult to avoid repeating the keywords in your text, particularly if it is very long. But try to avoid using it more than three or four times.

Another SEO element is called internal linking. It is when you use anchor text to create internal links to another page on your site. Here is an example.

Because I am writing about SEO, I can tell you that I wrote a great article about keyword tools.

If you click the preceding link, it takes you to another article on this site.

Internal linking relates one article to another. It helps search engines understand your site, and it also helps create a better user experience.

The best way is to place internal links to your new articles into your high-quality and higher-ranking pages that have already been indexed.

This will help your new article’s ranking a little.

Summary

1. Carefully select your long-tail keyword phrase

2. Use your keyword in the four designated positions

3. Use internal linking to all new articles.

3. Off-page SEO

In essence, anything you do to promote your site is off-page.

On your social media profiles, you can add a link to your site. You can also create a link to your website by commenting on other blogs or newspapers.

Some new sites use paid search, such as Google Adwords, to boost site rankings and get a kickstart for a young website or blog by attracting more organic search results.

You can also use content marketing.

By writing content that you publish on other sites, even for products and services that are not directly related to your blog’s topic, you will get a chance to add a useful backlink to your site.

Also, telling people you know or are in contact with within your daily life can help too. An article about you in your regional paper can act like local SEO.

 

4. Amazon SEO

It is not just web pages and blog posts that you need to know how to write SEO.

If you have a book published on Amazon, you can use SEO techniques to help you find more readers.

You might not realize it, but when you published your book, you had to add seven keywords.

These work exactly the same as keywords in a blog post.

The only difference is that they help people find your book on Amazon rather than Google.

You should do your research on these keywords and make sure that they are helping you find readers.

There are many ways you can research Amazon keywords for free.

 

Conclusion

You don’t need to be an expert like Neil Patel to use SEO strategies.

It’s quite easy to optimize your website or blog by taking simple steps and measures and developing new writing habits. Then you can check your progress with any one of many free SEO tools.

If you use these three SEO basics I have outlined, your site and search ranking will improve over time.

But remember that a three-year-old site will perform better than a three-month-old site. So be patient.

Always keep your site’s reputation top of mind. Add your keyword in four places in every article you write, add internal links, and promote your site at every opportunity.

Then you will have mastered enough to learn how to write SEO to help your site improve considerably.

 

Related Reading: Check Your Writing Before You Publish Anything Online

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