If you want people to visit your website or blog, you need to know a thing or two about search engine optimization (SEO). There are plenty of blogs and books out there that will help you become an SEO expert. I know, I’ve read a lot of them. If you’re just starting out with SEO, here are four things you can learn in five minutes.
#1 – Use a Descriptive Page Title – this is the first thing search engines see. It’s the stuff that appears in the top of your browser window. If you name your page “Home”, you’ll be competing 21 Billion other pages on the Internet. Name your pages (or posts) something descriptive.
#2 – Publish Interesting Stuff – make your content ‘likable’ to make it ‘linkable’. If you write content that is helpful and easy to digest, readers will be more likely to share a link to it. Every time a new site links to your content, it’s value increases – some links are worth more than others. Write good posts and you’ll get more traffic. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.
#3 – Use a Descriptive URL – descriptive URLs don’t help your SEO much (according to the SEO gurus out there). However, in the dozen or so times I’ve used a descriptive URL (jeremyporter.com for example), it’s been relatively easy to rank highly for the term. Keep this in mind with your blog posts as well – match the stuff after the / with keywords relevant to your post (matching your page title is a good idea).
#4 – Keyword Density - everybody thinks they know this one. Repeat a keyword a dozen times on the page and you’ll rank highly. Not exactly. I’m going to change “keyword density” to “keyword consistency”. Use the same keywords in your page title, description, body content, section headings, image filenames, and alternate image text. When a search engine is trying to figure out what your page is about, the more consistent you are with our word choice, the higher the likeliness you’ll rank for those keywords.
BONUS: Localization – it’s estimated that more than 80% of searches contain a local component. That means people are searching for a search term, plus a city and/or state or a zip code. If you use localized search terms in your keywords, you’ll be able to rank higher for more targeted, geographic searches.
There you go. There are four things (five with the bonus) that will help you get your content to rank higher in search engines. Want to know more? Post your questions in the comments. Have other tips you want to share? Please leave a comment. Thanks!
