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SEO. Three little letters that can get awfully intimidating.
That’s a shame, in my opinion. Sometimes I talk to companies and individuals with really unique, compelling stories to tell, but they get completely hamstrung by a set of esoteric-seeming technical mumbo-jumbo around gaming search engines.
Worse, the technical smoke and mirrors can obscure the fact that what matters most in search is simple: Well-written content with useful information targeted to a specific audience.
Let’s break that down a little.
“Well-written”: this means writing that is concise, organized and mindful of keywords.
“Useful information”: ideally information that’s not readily available elsewhere. In other words a niche you are uniquely qualified to provide content on.
“Targeted”: You have identified a group of people who really need the information you want to provide.
If you can address those three things (and I’m not saying that’s easy!), you can feel free to ignore the scary-sounding technical stuff around finer points of meta keywords, canonicalization or fill in the SEO-jargon-du-jour.
Your performance in search should improve markedly over time. And it will feel organic.
Are you ready to get started? Here are some great action steps for improving the impact of your writing in search:
- If you want to improve the quality of your writing generally: it’s hard to do better than the classic, Strunk & White, Elements of Style. Even though this was written pre-computer age, it still has a lot of value for organizing ideas and cutting out fluff.
- If you want to make your content more targeted: Conduct a competitive analysis of others in the space; research other organizations or writers who are on the same subject as yours. What qualities do you think makes their work successful or popular?
- If you want to ensure you’re leveraging keywords: use a tool like Google AdWords to see the search volume of terms you are using.
