5 things that really matter to search engines
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Google is one of your most important readers
Writing's hard enough already, without having to worry about Google, isn't it? Sometimes you just want to say "Stuff search engine optimisation. If Google's so damn smart and omnipotent, they should write their algorithim so it can work my site out without my help". And I hear you because I used to feel the same way. Since then, however, I think my writing has improved because of what I've learned and I think I've built the appeal of this site but that's another story.
I wrote a while ago about Brian Clark's SEO copywriting report and encouraged you to read it. I still do but, with Brian's permission, I'm going to borrow from just one part of it, which is his section Five Areas to Focus On for Effective SEO Copywriting.
If you're too busy to get any deeper than this into making your website Google-friendly, just do these five things and you'll be a long way towards improving your search juice:
1. Choose your blog post and page titles wisely
WordPress plugins like Yoast's WordPress SEO Plugin allow you to have two titles:
One like the one that appears as the title of this post
A different one that is picked up by Google
For the on-page title you might choose something fun or slightly obscure but that will be understood by your human readers.
For the search engine title you want one that pops when viewed by a reader scanning search results. It will pop because it's obvious immediately that your page is relevant to their search.You'd want to make sure your keywords were in this alternative title. Seeing the keywords they're searching for in the title makes people more likely to click the link to your site.
As Brian Clark says, "When people search for something, they're going to want to see the language they used reflected back at them in the results. Nothing mysterious about that."
Pro tip: try to keep the length of your title under 72 characters for search purposes. This will ensure the full title is visible in a search result, increasing the likelihood of a click-through.
2. Meta-Description
SEO copywriting is not just about ranking. It's also about what your content looks like on a search engine results page (SERP). The meta description of your content will generally be the "snippet" copy for the search result below the title, which influences whether or not you get the click.
Your meta description dictates those 30 words or so of text that appear under the title of your page when seen in the Google search results. You want to make sure you've written that description and not let it default to Google pulling out a few words from your page to put there.
The search engine results page without a defined meta-description
In the example above Derek hasn't written a meta-description so Google has just pulled a few words from the post that it believes demonstrates the relevant of the post to my search for "taleist self-publishing survey".
A search engine result showing the meta-description I wrote for the page
In this example you can see that Google is showing a potted description written especially for the purpose, the meta-description. You can see that it doesn't tale off with a "…" because it's not an excerpt pulled from the page by Google. The words in bold have been boldfaced by Google to highlight words relevant to my search for "taleist self-publishing survey".
Yoast's WordPress SEO Plugin will let you do this (as will others but that's the one I rely on)
3. Content
Rambling is the enemy of human and machine readers. Brian's advice:
"Keep your posts tightly on-topic and strongly centered on the subject matter of the desired keyword phrases (this goes back to the spoon feeding analogy).
If your content is too short, however, search engines might dismiss it as not useful enough. A 300-word minimum is a good rule of thumb.
4. Keyword Frequency
To be honest with you this is my least favourite part of checking the search engine friendliness of my posts. If you mention a word too often, Google might think you're "keyword stuffing", i.e. loading your page with a ridiculous amount of repetition to try to fool a search engine into thinking your page must be super useful on that topic.
Mention your keywords too infrequently, however, and a search engine might not get what your post is about.
"It's generally accepted that keyword frequency affects ranking (and that makes logical sense)," says Brian. "Keyword density, as some sort of 'golden' ratio, probably doesn't. But the only way to make sense of an appropriate frequency is via the ratio of those keywords to the rest of the content, so density is still a metric you need."
In short, the only way to tell if your repetition of keywords is super or spammy is to measure that frequency against the overall length of the content. A keyword density greater than 5.5 per cent could find you guilty of keyword stuffing.
You'll be amazed how quickly you get exceed that density. I used to hate counting words but then I found Scribe, which does it all for me. That's not all it does for me but, frankly, almost that alone makes it worth every penny.
5. Linking Out
I'm hardly a hippy but one of my favourite things about social media, including blogging, is that it rewards those who are the most generous.
Linking is the same. You might think it would hurt to have lots of links on your site to other sites because you could lose your visitors as they click away. But if you don't have those visitors in the first place because search engines think you're miserly, irrelevant and an unhelpful black hole…
Search engines reward those who are the most useful.
"Linking is the fundamental basis of the web," says Brian. "Search engines want to know you're sufficiently 'connected' with other pages and content, so linking out to other pages matters when it comes to search engine optimization.
Some rules of thumb:
Link to relevant content fairly early in the body copy
Link to relevant pages approximately every 120 words of content
Link to relevant interior pages of your site or other sites
Link with naturally relevant anchor text (Brian explains more about this in the report)
See how you go
Nothing in all of that is complicated but it's all incredibly important. If you do nothing else, give those things a go and keep an eye on your search rankings for topics that are important to you.
But, if I were you, I'd take a look at Brian's report. Click here to grab your free SEO report.
What's your experience? Have you noticed any improvement in your own site by paying more attention to how you're doing with search engines? Let me know in the comments section…
Comment on this post or share it at: 5 things that really matter to search engines
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