Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the backbone of content on the Internet. Be it written articles, videos, images, or any other form of content, all of these need some form of search engine optimization for optimum performance. In this article, we aim to bring you some quick SEO tips that can help you.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

A search engine is a website (in essence) that allows users to browse the Internet. The Internet is massive! And there is no possible way that the average user can find what they want on the Internet without a catalog. A search engine provides just that. An estimated 93% of all traffic on the Internet comes through search engines.

Search Engine Optimization is the process of using different techniques and tools to curate online content so that they become much more search engine friendly, Internet-friendly, and most importantly, Internet user friendly.

The most popular search engine in the world is Google. It accounts for 76% of Internet users. Second in line is Bing, closely followed by Yahoo, and other popular search engines are Baidu, Yandex, Ask.com, and so on.

According to the above statistics, it is pretty clear that content creators should divert most of their energy towards optimizing their content for the Google search engine. The good news is that SEO is pretty universal. If your website ranks well on Google, there is a high chance that it will follow suit on other search engines, too.

How does SEO help?

According to studies, there is a 33% chance of an Internet user visiting the first result on Google search results. Just being ranked 2nd on Google reduces this percentage by more than half, to 17%. Similarly, the third rank drops user engagement to 11% and it goes down further on until at about 15th rank, the probability of traffic reduces to almost 0%.

So, it is very important that your content ranks high on Google or other search engines for the best traffic potential.

Search Engine Optimization helps in this. SEO helps search engines separate quality content from other generic content, spam content, and copypasta content. Search engines recognize quality content and reward them by ranking them higher on their search result pages. This ensures that the people get the best of the Internet without having to filter through millions of subpar content.

Also, since SEO helps enhancing the user experience of the content, it is likely that the users will engage more with the content and even return back for more.

SEO Tips and Tricks for Top Search Engine Rankings

We will list down some of the best practices when it comes to search engine optimization. Try to incorporate as many of these tips into every content you create.

(1) Uniqueness of content

The Internet is massive. There are articles, videos, guides, recipes, DIYs, how-to’s, how not to’s, and everything else in between a million times. So, it really is not easy to compete with a very popular topic if you are starting out right now. But this does not mean you cannot succeed on the Internet either. Content creation is one of the biggest income-earning modes in this day and age.

If you are going to write an article about something, write it yourself. Do not copy-paste sentences from other websites. Because, if somebody was looking up that specific sentence on a search engine, chances are that the website you copied it from will appear in a higher rank than yours. It is okay to copy-paste quotes, definitions, stats from other websites, but make sure to credit them with a link back to their website.

When you write your own content or record your own videos, it will have your personal touch. Rather than being generic and copying someone else’s work, this uniqueness will give you an edge on the vast seas of content on the Internet. Who knows, maybe people will like your unique style over others!

Be unique…be you!

(2) Content Length

When it comes to content length, there are no hard and fast rules. But the generally accepted rules of thumb are, a written article to be over 500 words, and a video to be over 10 minutes.

The longer a person stays on your website, the better. However, not necessarily the longest articles are better, and the shortest are worse when it comes to SEO. A bigger factor to consider is how important the content you deliver in the article or video. If your audience feels like the article is full of gibberish and filler content, it is likely that they will skim through the article and leave soon. This is pretty bad in terms of SEO.

Your contents must be short-and-sweet to the point. This will make the visitor read the entire article and possibly even browse more articles on your website. The same goes for videos on YouTube.

However, finding that sweet spot of content length is an experiment initially. Depending on your niche, the article lengths can vary. Also, depending on your content-writing skills or video-making skills, you will be able or be unable to retain your audience on the content.

Try different lengths and tactics to keep your audience informed or entertained!

(3) Title optimization

The title of your article or video plays a crucial role in attracting the Internet traffic.

Remember how we said 33% of the Internet users visit the first search result on Google and 17% of them visit the second result? The latter group of people opted to visit the second link because they perceived it to be more relevant for what they were looking for.

The title of your content should be able to gain attention and attract Internet users. In essence, it should be a very high-level description of what your article is about.

One important SEO tip to remember is to make sure your title contains the keyword of your content. We discuss this further in point (5) below.

There is no specific title length that you have to abide by. But, search engines will cut out the title from their search results page if it is too long. As a rule of thumb, try to keep the titles less than 12 words (each with about 3-6 words).

Creating engaging titles will also be an ongoing experiment. Be creative. Be precise. Get to the point. Be honest. Clickbait titles can earn you more traffic for a brief period. But Google will punish your contents in the long run massively for this offense.

(4) Add multimedia

“A picture speaks a thousand words”

Add at least one picture to your article. This breaks the ‘tedious’ reading flow and gives your reader’s brains a refreshing change of pace. So, add a picture or two, always relevant to the contents of the article, so that it adds value to the reader.

More images don’t necessarily equate to better content. Maintain a decent balance between the article contents and multimedia.

Make sure to use copyright-free images, or with proper permission to use them. Also, make sure to give the source as a backlink in the caption of the image or at the bottom of the article separately.

An important SEO tip to remember when it comes to multimedia is that you add relatively fewer resource-consuming items to your article. The bigger the image is (megabytes), the longer it will take for the image to load up on the article. You have to find good-quality images without increasing the load time of your articles.

Aim for 1200 x 628 pixel size images that are less than 200KB. This can be tricky. But not impossible.

(5) Keyword/keyphrase optimization

Keyword optimization is still very important when it comes to SEO. A keyword is a word/s or a short phrase around which your article is based on. For example, the keyword for this article is ‘SEO tips.’

The keyword should appear throughout the article. It should appear in the content title. It’s better to include it in the first paragraph of the article, and a few recurrences throughout.

A desirable keyword/keyphrase density is around 5%. This is measured by the number of times the keyword appears throughout the article divided by the total word count on your article. When creating videos, this density number does not make a lot of sense as long as you use the word appropriately in your narrations.

A good way to look at keywords or keyphrases is to imagine what a typical Internet user will search on Google to find what you are writing about. For example, if you are writing an article about ‘5 tallest mountains in the world’ you can determine that the users will search for ‘tallest mountains.’ This will be your keyphrase for this article. Make sure to include ‘tallest mountains’ throughout the article a few times and make sure it fits in naturally.

Overpopulating the article with keywords is a big no-no as Google algorithms are smart enough to recognize that you are trying to cheat their system. They will take action to demote your article and even your entire website if this practice persists.

Do you have to do keyword research for SEO?

Keyword research is where you use a tool such as Google Keyword Planner to determine if the keyword you are focusing on is worthy of your efforts. In simple terms, it will tell you if there are enough people looking for a specific keyword or phrase on the Internet.

While keyword research is very important, it is also important that you create content that you love. Chances are there will be an audience for pretty much any topic you like. The flip side is that that there is too much content already on the Internet about your keyword. These are keywords that are difficult to rank for. You might want to avoid such keywords but you should not be discouraged to give it a try anyway.

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(6) Do a Google search before you begin

Before you unleash your creativity in creating your content, do a Google search for the keyword you determined for the content. This will give you a rough idea of your competition. Every search result that you see is something your article has to compete against.

A quick Google search also gives you some ideas about what the Internet is talking about relating to the keyword. You might even pick some subtopics you had not considered previously.

Most importantly, if you scroll down to the bottom of the Google search results, you will see ‘related searches’ for your keyword or phrase. These phrases give you an important hint about what the world is looking for on the Internet. Usually, these are 2-5 word phrases and thus can be considered ‘long-tail keywords.’ Granted the scope of an article based on a long-tail keyword will be narrower than a normal keyword, but your article will have higher chances of ranking on top of Google.

See the ‘related searches’ example for the ‘handmade cards’ keyword on Google below. You could write your article on the broad topic of ‘handmade cards’ as you had originally planned. This will likely include all these related search results as well. However, it will be quite difficult to get a high ranking on Google for this keyword.

An important SEO tip to remember is that the broader your keyword is the more exposure your article will have, but difficult to rank high. On the other hand, the narrower your keyword is, the less exposure there is but relatively easier to rank high on search results. So, it is a delicate balance you have to find.

(7) H1, H2, & H3 headings and subheadings

Headings are important formatting in text content. Headings give your article a flow and structure. They make it easier for visitors to find specific sections of the article.

In SEO, H1 headings are the title of the article, and thus you can only use one of them. We covered title optimization in point (3) above.

H2 and H3 headings can be used any amount of times throughout the article. In fact, there are 6 levels of headings on WordPress–H1 through H6. Visually, the difference is with text size in each of these. However, behind the scenes, these headings help search engines identify different sections of the article and present the most relevant information to the audience.

Let’s take the ‘handmade cards’ example from above. Say you write the article on handmade cards and include subtopics/subheadings such as ‘personalized handmade cards’ or ‘luxury handmade cards’ or ‘wedding handmade cards’ within your article. An Internet user searches for ‘wedding handmade cards.’ But your article title is different. In this case, there is a chance that Google will give a higher ranking to an article specifically written on the ‘wedding handmade cards’ topic. However, having an H2 or H3 subheading on ‘wedding handmade cards’ can give your article a fighting chance here. And that is huge!

Think of H2 to H6 headings as different ‘levels’ of depth in your article. Have H2 headings as the main sections of your article and include H3 headings if you want to dive into further sub-sections inside the H2 heading.

An important SEO tip here is to try and include your keyword or phrase in the H2 headings at least. This is not mandatory. But it helps when Google decides what headings are most relevant for the search results.

(8) Internal links and external links

Internal links are links that redirect to a different page or homepage on the same website the article is on. An external link, on the other hand, is a link that redirects a user to an external website.

Internal links encourage the audience to remain on your website for longer. They can read related articles or any topics that might interest them on your website. Remember, user engagement on the website (time spent) is crucial in SEO. This metric hints to search engines that users enjoy spending time on your website and thus it will direct more people to your website.

External links help you give credit to a third-party website. You can include text, images, or videos from other websites and link back to their websites as further reading if your audience is interested. Remember, too many of these external links will prompt your users to continuously leave your website. We don’t want that.

Links should be clearly visible to the audience. We don’t want to trick them or force them to click on links. They should appear natural and non-invasive to the user experience.

Keep both internal and external links to an optimum level–a level that does not hinder user experience on your article and website.

(9) Build a social media presence

All this time we talked about on-site SEO (tips and tricks that you don your content). However, you can improve the SEO of your content off-site as well. One of the most important elements in off-site SEO is building a social media presence.

Today, building a social media presence is easier than ever. You do have the opportunity to create pages, groups, business accounts, and so on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and whatnot. Create quality content on these social media accounts and invite the audience to like, follow, and share. This will give your content direct access to an audience rather than waiting for Google traffic.

However, it does more than just build a secondary traffic source. Your social media fanbase is likely to be returning visitors. They will likely read every article you publish and watch every video you create. Google Analytics will see this. It will see returning visitors who engage on the website for longer times. As we already know, this is the goal of SEO. Google search will reward your website as a result, with higher search result rankings for your website.

Make sure to add social media buttons for your articles so that people who love them can share them on their social media as well.

(10) Use FAQs

FAQ stands for frequently asked questions. A lot of people do ‘ask questions’ from Google rather than just typing a keyword. Your article can provide answers to these questions and have a better chance of improving search result visibility.

People are more likely to search ‘what are the best SEO tips?’ on Google as opposed to ‘SEO tips.’ You already have your article optimized for the latter. So it might be worth optimizing it for the questions as well. This way, your article will capture both forms of search queries.

Google will show an excerpt from your article extracted from directly where the same question and answer appears on your article. So, you have to have the same question in your article and the answer directly underneath. The question can be an H3 subheading so Google identifies it clearly.

Hold on. You don’t have to brainstorm questions by yourself. Google can help with this, too. Do a simple keyword or phrase search on Google. Usually, the frequently asked questions appear halfway through the search results (see the image below).

You can use these questions directly in your article (only relevant ones, as sometimes these questions can be not very relevant) and answer them. You are directly resolving a problem of someone and they will appreciate it rather than making them read through a 1,000-word article.

(11) Optimize, not overdo

SEO is a delicate balance of doing the right thing the right way in the right quantities. You cannot overdo something with the hopes of ‘cheating’ the system. Whilst this might give you some edge in the very short term, Google and other search engines are usually quick to catch up. They will punish your content and website severely if poor quality content is pushed to the Internet.

Always optimize your content with the SEO tips and tricks given in this article. SEO is a vast topic and it keeps on changing. So, make sure to read a few articles on SEO every year and update yourself with the latest changes. Google, other search engines, and the Internet, in general, are moving towards improving user experience. They will keep on raising the bar for quality content and quality content wins in the end.

Conclusion

After everything said and done about search engine optimization, your goal should be to create content that enhances user experience. This in turn will trickle into better search engine optimization. So, when creating content, think about how you would experience your content if you were a mere visitor. Would you enjoy reading/watching the content? How can you improve the experience? Does the content add value to the audience? Answer these questions and improve your content continuously.

Let us know if you have your own SEO tips and tricks that could benefit all of us. If you have any questions, do drop them in the comments below.