SEO Sleuthing
Once upon a time, I worked for a small company that made and sold girls clothing. They had a website that brought in a little bit of traffic and they asked me to get more traffic to it so I began researching SEO. I improved things for them and they were happy enough.
Well, let me tell you that SEO from 10+ years ago is NOT the same as SEO today. It changes constantly. So if I’m to stay on top of it, I would need to research it constantly. Which I won’t. But I did research it lately and found a few helpful tips for me. Perhaps they’re helpful for you, too.
- Keyword research is important. I won’t go into detail on this because you can stop over on the website I linked to and read up on it. Helpful stuff. Think of it like finding the trending hashtags on Twitter.
- Do something with those keywords. When I’ve done my research, I plan to post blogs in the next few months around these subjects. It’s helpful to have content suggestions when writing.
- Write about what you’re an expert in. People like hearing from somebody who knows what they’re talking about.
- Interview an expert.
- Shoot for 300 words, at least. The magic number seems to be 1,500. Search engines like in-depth, which surprises me, because personally, I prefer to read short, specifically lists. So I want to mix it up: lists for my reading enjoyment, lengthier posts to make search engines happy.
- Optimize the content. Apparently since I’m on a wordpress platform, there are some good ones out there I should look into and start using such as Yoast and Shareaholic. This one needs further research on my part.
- Be your own editor. Content reads better with more white space so avoid long paragraphs. Don’t make typos. Use grammar well (not good). Sometimes, I walk away from a blog post before publishing, then come back and read it once I’ve let it sit. I’ll catch mistakes better this way.
- Do your own PR. For my personal blog, I do this some by sharing my posts to Facebook. Other places to share: instagram, reddit, twitter, digg, and stumbleupon.
So that’s the start of my research. What did I miss? What else is important for SEO?