SEO: A Beginner’s Guide
Search engine optimization (SEO) often seems threatening or unfamiliar to most people. People look to invest in SEO specialists to improve their Google rankings. And others who have no money to hire a professional feel their site is destined to be ignored by search engines. Faced by these questions, we can take a look at what SEO really is and what it offers.
SEO is the name given to a set of practices web developers keep in mind while designing content. There are many guidelines that are offered by different people on how to improve rankings. We will first go over the fundamentals of content design, and then go over some recommended practices.
First and foremost, good content must be your foundation. Invest time in bringing out good information with unique presentation. If the information is good, the users will find you. Most web writers fall into the keyword phrase trap. Though considered important for SEO, it shouldn’t be the driving force. The content shouldn’t make it obvious to the reader that a key phrase was intentionally put in. Search engines themselves are advanced to blacklist sites that overdose on keywords. By concentrating on clean and informative content, users will automatically return to your site. I came across a comment on a blog recently, and it surely is worth its weight in gold: “Do something interesting, create something interesting and MAKE SOMETHING WORTH MY TIME”. If we start off with this mindset and then optimize our product with recommended SEO practices we stand a better shot at getting noticed.
Some technical processes involved in SEO are using meta-tags in HTML, options that instruct robots that a page should be crawled or not and the most important would be cross linking. Most beginners might not understand any of these concepts, and the good news is that these options are growing obsolete by the day. Google over time has seen that people try and exploit these factors to try and get higher rankings. And in most cases the information wasn’t close to being good. As a result search engines have actively altered their crawling strategy and ranking system. It doesn’t mean that these steps are completely ineffective, but as we said before, good content ensures that a user will return to your site. Bad content will ensure a user stays away from your site even if you happen to be on the first page of the search results.
To make it easy for a novice content manager, we can make a simple checklist of the things they need to keep in mind before publishing content.
- Is the content easy to read?
- Has the article been condensed to its minimal size, and have facts as its strength?
- Avoid using big words. If you think a fifth grader will not understand a word, by rule, look for a simpler substitute.
- Does the content have a central theme? On reading an article, one must associate a mental keyword that can describe the content. If your content passes this check, then you can boldly use that keyword or phrase as your title.
- Use an iterative editing process. Once an article is written, revisit at a later time to edit it. This process will help identify the regions that need condensing or changing. Two or three repetitions will make sure your content is at its optimal readability.
- IS YOUR CONTENT UNIQUE? This question should always be on your mind. The more unique, the higher the likelihood that the content will come up higher on searches. And good information will get you loyal users who will keep coming back for more.
- As a finishing touch, add meta-tags in your HTML, but do not overdose on it. A keyword or two should suffice. And make sure that this phrase does not repeat in your content more than 3-5 times.
SEO in simple terms means common sense. Use them as guidelines, and soon you will see they come as naturally to you as regular writing. And just to hammer the point home, let’s repeat to ourselves: Good content is King.