Web Writing — Part Five, Search Engine Optimisation

Why do we need SEO?

Organic, or natural, search results are from visitors naturally searching for your content, or your site ranking high because of its content and reputation.

Otherwise, firms need to pay for advertising to draw attention.

Keeping up with how search engines work is like running on an ever-changing racetrack. While the people behind various engines don’t tell us all their inner workings, I’ve provided some of the better established facts to help anyone setting up her own blog, as in Part Four. This also works if you are providing content to other sites, as we discussed in Parts One and Three. If you supply a post which is already SEO optimised, that is less work for the site staff to do, you look professional, and your page will get more hits. If your posts are drawing in visitors, you will be asked to post again.

What search engines like

Many search engines are available, including:

• Bing
• Yahoo
• Ask
• Ecosia plants trees to thank you for using them
• DuckDuckGo does not keep any record of your searches
• Google is the big name in the field.

As mentioned in Part Four, the founders of Google as a web indexing engine, decided that Google would prefer, or rank, sites and pages which were well structured. They chose the layout of high school essays. Headline, sub-headings. Clear paragraphs and an introduction, middle and an end. Labelled and alt-text photos or graphs.

Google likes frequent and updated posts.

Poor spelling will not help. See Part Two of this series for more tips on writing detail.

The links you need

Google (and other search engines) likes referencing and links. They help to provide organic search results. Inline links look neat, but you may want to write links in full as references. I don’t click on Bitly (shortened) links in emails as I can’t see where they are pointing. Ideally, the page should open in a new tab.

Suppose a person is searching for information on an art exhibition. Google can help people view the route to take, gallery premises and artist information, on the gallery site. When a text to speech reader, used by someone with reduced vision, reads the page it may store the inline links in a sidebar. So when the user comes to visit the links, only the text of the link is available and the useful link says ‘Copper House Gallery’ or ‘National Gallery’ but the less useful link says ‘here’. Not only that, but Google reads the link texts and this helps Google in SEO ranking for your site and the site you are referencing.

Links should be to reputable, oft-quoted sources like Encyclopaedia Brittanica or MoMA. Not a blog full of wild assertions. Google checks what the link is to, so if your page is about organic gardening and the page it links to is advertising ski holidays, that is not a logical link. Google checks the link text as well to see if it fits the external page.

• Broken links are noticed. Check that a page you put up a few months ago still has all the links working, as you have no control over someone else’s web pages.
• Internal links are to other pages in your own website.
• External links point to other websites.
• Inbound links are when other sites point to yours, which Google rates higher.
• Reciprocal links are when yours and another site point to each other; these are worth more, but Google penalises people who set up sockpuppet sites for that purpose.

What format to use

Google likes lists, especially neat, bulleted lists like the above, or Top Five type.

Take the time to write the alt-text behind images, if your blog site requires a separate text to the caption. Google reads the alt-text. You may see an image of a celebrity come up in search results when you have asked about gay singers, but the celeb is a straight tennis player. The explanation is that Google read the caption on this photo, which was taken with the sports star enjoying themselves at the same-sex wedding of their two best friends.

Do clickbait headlines work?

Clickbait is an eye-grabbing headline, like someone shouting Fire! But when it turns out there is no fire, readers leave and do not return.

If your tags or headline are about Taylor Swift but she is not mentioned in the page, Google knows. Google reads all the text. You may draw in a few readers, but if your page isn’t appearing in the search rankings, they won’t see the headline in the first place.

Well-written, well-formatted posts, published on a regular basis, will help you come to the attention of readers interested in your topic.

Next post will cover legal issues.

Clare O’Beara

Originally published at http://insidedbs.wordpress.com on February 7, 2021.