SEO Basics for Authors
Writers might think that they don’t
need to know much about SEO, but big organizations depend on it for traffic. If
you have a website, blog or online store, SEO can help your business grow. SEO
is important because many search engine users usually click on one of the top
five links in the results page. The main goal of SEO is to show your value,
your website pages will be ranked highly for queries relevant to the content.
SEO helps your customers to find you.
What
is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a
way of formatting content on a webpage so it appears in a high rank within
results of what people look for on search engines.
What should be added to articles and
blog posts for it to show in search engines?
For SEO purposes, consider tagging
your posts and articles with descriptors including:
•
Keywords
•
Alt tags
•
Links
•
Meta links
•
Permalinks
What
is website traffic?
This is anything that visits your
site. It includes both human visitors and automated programs.
What
are organic results?
When people use search engines, they
are shown a page that contains search results for the keyword they used. Each
result page has two types of results: organic and paid.
Organic results are listings on that
page that appear because of their relevance to search terms. Paid results are
ads paid for and displayed when someone types in terms that match advertiser’s
criteria.
How
is traffic measured?
A specialized website analytics
service is used to measure website traffic. It works by including a short code
to your web pages. This shortcode is generated by the service that you use.
Depending on the service, the code will track all things including the visitors
that visit your site, the pages they visit, how long they stay, the browser
they are using and their location.
What
are permalinks?
WordPress uses the title of the
article as a permalink by default. However, sometimes the title is too long
that search engines don’t pick up. WordPress offers a permalinks tool to edit
the URL of the article. You should edit the permalink link to about 4 keywords.
That helps in making the article rank better. When the article goes live, it
will be too late to edit the permalink. If you try to, it will cause “file not
found” or 404 error. This causes Google to remove the article from the index.
What are Keywords and how best can I
use them?
Keywords are phrases or words that
sum up the article. The best way to snag traffic is by adding keywords in
headlines and subheads.
Should
writers worry about keyword density?
Keyword density describes web content
in such a way that many keywords are packed into few words. Writers shouldn’t
worry about keyword density. A research has shown that keyword density doesn’t
matter. A well-written content always wins in the long run.
What
is the best way to choose keywords to describe a post or story?
There are a lot of keyword tools to
use. You can use Google AdWords Keyword, Soovle and SpyFu to get popular
keywords. Use the keywords in your content. These are the words that people use
to search for a specific topic. These are the words that you would use if you
were a user to search for content. These phrases are added to the headline or
first paragraph. Use the topic and search and see what comes up. Use different
word combinations and phrases. Look at
keywords that brought people to your site and use the terms when writing on the
subject again.
What’s
the importance of Links?
To improve SEO, add links to other
web pages in blog posts or stories as a way to get quality websites linking
back to you. This will boost traffic and results. Adding links to your Facebook
page or blog help in raising credibility with search engines. Sites with
outbound links to other websites usually rank better.
How
does anchor text relate to links?
Anchor text is a text that you click
on in a link. You will see it on most websites as blue or underlined or both.
What
are alt tags and what’s their importance?
Alt tags are text descriptions of
images that search engines pay a close attention to. A good page has images and
these images have alt tags with keywords.
How
do you know if the SEO formatting on your blog post is working?
You will need Google Analytics to see
recent top keywords and trends over time. These tools will help you get what
people are searching for and you can write about that. If you have a website,
blog or news operation on WordPress, you can use the Google Analyticator
plugin. You can also use Google Webmaster tools to know where your site ranks
on specific keywords.
How
can Fiction writers use SEO?
They can use SEO to build audience
and reputation. Fiction writers can also use SEO to generate traffic and then
convert the traffic into Facebook fans and subscribers.
How
much time is required for SEO?
Some experts recommend an hour per
day. However, you can take as much time as you can. A website will be useless
if it can’t be found by users. Writers should focus on what they are good at
and hire someone for SEO work. It is a good option if you can afford.
What
are some of the SEO mistakes that most writers make?
The mistakes that writers make
include using free blog hosts and failing to use Google Analytics. If you want
a successful website, get away from Blogger and get a website. Always use
Google Analytics to see the trends. You should remember that search engines
must understand your content. Create a search-friendly site. Search engines use
links to determine trust and authority. Adding more links means more high
rankings and trust.
Why
do writers need SEO?
Writers need SEO to increase their
share of website traffic. Some researchers estimate that total searches per day
can go up to 6.5 billion. Since top-ranked results get about all of this
traffic, you need SEO to have your site at the top of the search results.
Why
is SEO that important?
The only way for your site to rank
higher without paying for ads is by performing SEO. SEO helps in maximizing the
advantages of using search engines as a marketing channel.
What
is web crawling?
This is the process of discovering
content on the internet by use of a web crawler. This web crawler is sometimes
called a spider. This is an internet bot that search engines use to browse the
internet.
How
does a web crawler work?
A web crawler is a program used to
discover updated pages for adding in a search index. Google Crawl process starts with some web
page URLs. These URLs are generated from earlier crawl processes and then
augmented with Sitemap data.
As this bot visit each website, it
detects links on every page and adds them to a list of web pages to crawl. A
new site will become existing sites and dead links are used to update the
search index.
What
does web crawling in SEO mean?
Without Googlebot crawling and
indexing your web pages, you won’t generate any free traffic.
How
can I get Google to Crawl my site?
Web crawlers use automated processes
to determine the sites to crawl, the number of times to be crawled and the
pages to fetch from each site.
This process cannot be impacted as
Google doesn’t accept payment to crawl a website frequently. However, all you
can do is ensure that Googlebot knows you. Ensure that Googlebot is not
blocked. Create a Sitemap and submit to Google Search Console.
How many Search engine ranking
factors are used?
When a user types something on a
search engine, Google algorithm searches the index that matches web pages and
shows the user results that are relevant. There are over 200 factors that
determine relevancy.
Best
Practices for search engine optimization
Here are the best practices that
apply to all sites irrespective of size, language, topic etc.
•
Use words in URLs. Use a structure that makes visitors know where they
are on your site.
•
Make it easy for users to go from general content to specific ones. Add
navigation pages.
•
Use text most of the time for navigation menus and links.
•
Have a custom 404 page that helps users to get back to a working page
•
Choose a title that communicates the topic of content
•
Use brief descriptive titles
•
Create unique title tags
•
Use descriptions for each page
•
Write an easy to read text that is on topic. Break the content into
logical chunks.
Conclusion
This is just a brief guide to SEO. There
are more to it than this, but if you do the recommended ones, you will see good
results. Follows this guide to generate traffic and get more audience for your
writing and books. SEO optimized pages generates more traffic which directly
leads to more people being converted. It will work great when you have great
content and ensure that you use the right keyword in the content.
The post SEO Basics for Authors appeared first on Slaven Vujic.
