Search Engine Optimization is a process of drafting your content and html of your web page in such a way that it will appear in unique and easily in a search engine feed. It is now a very important part of web-designing and content writing because this can help you rank your website in a better position in web search.
Let say you have a blog, where you write content on technical products daily – review or other stuff. Now even before publishing your content back in the mind you think of the related keywords and try to search them in your preferred browser. What you will see is the potential competition for your content.
So in the crowd of so much result how can you make your search result stand-out, is the question.
Search Engine Optimization, is the answer to your question. You need to follow some rules while creating content for rich content format, a few meta tags can help you out there.
Later we will see few concepts which can be followed to increase engagements on a web page.
The basics of SEO for a web page.
- Title
- Descriptions
- Meta Tags
- Featured Images
- Quality of content
- URL -slug-
- Backlink – Internal, External
Title of the content
Title is the first thing which you have to take extra care of. A unique and catchy title is always preferred and it is always a good approach to put extra creativity in title of your content. Most professional content creator actually put more efforts in creating a perfect title than their whole content. See title is the name of that web page, which is changeable but often considered a bad practice to apply. Other demand of a good title is ‘related word’ use, it is not advisable that you write a content about music and instrument but you use scientific names in title, which is then not use adequately in rest of the content, also to which user will not use to search on web browser with.
Description
Description is a short text which describes your objective for the content within few line. Meaning your in description you describe your content to the prospects can they expect from this content and why should they click on this link.
It is used by search engine with a meta tag under the property name “description”.
There are four sections in the above clip of a simple “google search” result.
from top to bottom they are –
- URL of the page
- Title of the page
- Description provided by meta tags or generated by google itself.
- Main navigational part inside the page.
Above is a very simple search snippet, you can also create rich results using in-page SEO.
META TAGS
Meta Tags provides structured metadata about a Web page. They are part of a web page’s <HEAD> section. Multiple Meta elements with different attributes can be used on the same page. Meta elements can be used to specify page description, keywords and any other metadata not provided through the other head elements and attributes
Basically they provide structured information of your page to the search engine. – THERE YOU GO!
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="Description" CONTENT="Author: A.N. Author, Illustrator: P. Picture, Category: Books, Price: £9.24, Length: 784 pages">
<meta name="google-site-verification" content="+nxGUDJ4QpAZ5l9Bsjdi102tLVC21AIh5d1Nl23908vVuFHs34="/>
<title>Example Books - high-quality used books for children</title>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
</head>
</html>Above code is the simplest code provided by the google to begin with meta tags.
Featured Image
If you thrive to create amazing content then making an attractive featured image should be the part of your content making habit. Featured image, apart from making look your content good, plays an important role in SEO and Digital Marketing.
Featured Image provided in the meta tags are used in search engines and social plugin shares like Facebook, Twitter etc along with your title and description. Not having a featured image can damage the structure of your content and can affect your reachability big time.
Quality Of Content
Here we will not talk about the research based quality of content but the structure base quality of content. In other words IN-PAGE-SEO.
While creating content creators often use internet as their premier research tool, and often time ending up copying and pasting the a chunk of that research without writing a single word of their own.
Now this is plagiarism and it directly impacts the richness of your content.
Other than that you have to make sure that you have enough text for the crawler to read. The crawler needs to read the text in order to show your result for related searched keywords. In short if you don’t have enough content in text, how will the google understand that this page comes in this category.
URL -slug-
.URL slug is the url text of you page after your domain name. a valid and a text based url slug can help in increasing the search result for your page, so you should make sure that you use related keywords in slug, preferably full spellings separated by (-).
Backlinking / Pingbacks – External / Internal
Backlinking/Pingbacks in my opinion is the most important and amazing technique for your search engine optimization. How I see backlinking is that they help you in attracting visitor, they help you in your page crawl faster, they keep the audience engage on the website for a longer duration.
Imagine if create a content and other website create a link referring to that content of yours then the firstly you will get traffic from other website diverted to your website and secondly google crawler will take your link seriously and prioritize your link result for related searches.- referred to as external linking.
Same can be done internally for a website, linking a another article with one article will increase the occurrence of link and then the chances of indexing of that page on search engine, another benefit is when user will finish reading one content then serving it with another article can increase the session duration of the user.