6 SEO tips to make sure your content is found by Google and other search engines
The internet has made the world a lot smaller. Unfortunately, the web has also become more and more densely populated with competitors, who all want to draw attention to their content. The rise of search engines – the best known of which is Google – has therefore been a logical development. Those search engines are basically computer programmes, that use algorithms to choose which websites to show and which to ignore. You can respond effectively to this development by using search engine optimisation, or SEO, when writing your content. SEO makes sure your website will be found by search engines like Google.
The danger in using SEO is that you get so obsessed with your keywords that your texts become unreadable. Writing good web content that is also SEO proof, is definitely a real art. To help you master this art we at Uisce give you 6 tips to make sure your content is readable and found.
SEO tips and tricks 1: know who your content is addressing
The most important thing for any business to know, is who their ideal customer is. You want to not only know who you want to sell to, but also who you do not want to sell to. This might sound awful contradictory. As a company you believe your product should benefit everyone, right? But trust us, if you do not write with your ideal customer in mind, you will not only fail to reach your target audience. Writing for everyone will cause you to reach no one. Your content will be too generic to appeal to anyone. So, step 1: make sure you know who you are talking to.
Are you just starting out and do you not yet know exactly which audience to address? Uisce helps you find out who your ideal customer is.
SEO tips and tricks 2: choose the right keywords to be found
Make sure you use the right keywords when writing your content. Ask yourself: Which words does my ideal customer use when searching the internet? Try to be as precise as possible and make a list of potential combinations. Then use a tool like KWfinder (https://kwfinder.com/) to check out how your keywords score. You are looking for those combinations of words who score high on search rate (Search) and low on difficulty (DIFF). Highlight all the combinations of words on your list that are searched for often and have a difficulty rate under 40. Now, start writing content for these keywords, using tips 3, 4, 5 and 6.
SEO tips and tricks 3: create an enticing title with your keyword combination
Your title is the very first place where you should use your keywords in order to be found. It is not only the first thing search engine crawlers check out, it is also the first thing your audience sees when your site appears in the search results. Now, in order to make people click on your particular article, you have to make sure that its content is something they just can’t resist. For instance, if we would have called this article How to Use SEO in Internet Content you might have thought: “Hm, interesting, don’t know how it applies to me, but…” and scour the rest of the search results to see what else is on offer. With its current title, however, you knew right away that SEO was something that would help you get found on Google ánd that this article would give you hands on tips on how to make it happen. Just by using the right title, we conveyed what excellent material we had on offer.
SEO tips and tricks 4: use your keywords in the body of the text wisely
So, now you know what keywords to use and you have come up with a title that your ideal customer cannot resist. The next step is to make sure Google knows that your content is sound all the way and not just a fancy title and no real content. How to do that? Use your keywords frequently in the first paragraph, let’s say the first 100 words. After that, use them only sporadically. Of course, you do want to make sure that the content remains a good read as well. That’s exactly what makes SEO writing a real art. You want to combine excellent writing with making sure the text works for search engine algorithms as well.
SEO tips and tricks 5: write useful headings to help search engines find you
Headings are essential for web copy. Not only do well-placed headings make an article more readable and more likely to hold your reader’s attention, it is also part of the whole SEO thing. Search engines check out your headings to see whether the content indeed discusses what the URL (the unique web address that you see in the address bar above) and title suggests. So, make sure you choose your subheading strategically. They should not only reflect the contents of the paragraph that follows. They should also fit into the bigger picture, to be found by the customers you want to serve.
SEO tips and tricks 6: use that snippet
One of the best WordPress plugins for any serious internet writer is Yoast SEO (link: https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/ ). Before you even go live, you should have installed this, as it will help you so much with your content writing. We could write a whole article on Yoast alone, which we surely will at some point. But for the sake of this article, it suffices to know that, once you have activated and walked through the setup wizard, Yoast will provide you with some excellent tools on your posts and pages. You can check out whether your content is readable and get workable tips right away to improve it. You can also find out how your content scores in relation to your keyword use. Thirdly, Yoast enables you to adjust your snippets. Snippets are the combination of your content title, the slug – the words the URL is made up of – and the meta description. The meta description is the little piece of text that Google shows underneath each link on their search pages to give you an idea on what a page is about. Now, what it boils down to, is that your keywords should appear in all three of these.
Final SEO tips and tricks: practice, practice, practice, a whole lot of reading and staying up to date
There is a lot more to be said about SEO. For instance, there are technical aspects to running a well-found website that are outside the scope of this blog. We can imagine that you feel daunted by all this information. You will get the hang of it, but it will take plenty of practice and you will have to stay on top of the algorithms, because they change regularly. Of course, we can imagine that you feel that all this is keeping you from doing actual business. But we can’t stress enough that this IS an important part of doing business nowadays.
Luckily, you can outsource it. Uisce can help you create a website that will reflect exactly what you and your business are about and optimise your chances of being found. Just get in touch and find out what the options are. No strings attached…
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