SEO Techniques are Just Good Composition
You probably know by now how important things like grammar, structure, spelling and formatting are for writing clean and easy to read content for humans, but did you know how closely those match up to standards of readability for search engines like Google?
Good SEO is Just Good Composition
While these SEO practices might seem esoteric or confusing (perhaps in the same way learning to write well in English felt when you were first being introduced to it) they’re no more -and often significantly less- intricate and demanding than the standards a human editor might impose on a piece of writing meant for human consumption.
Search engines want to display your content, they just need to clearly understand what it is and who they should show it to. Providing good formatting for SEO isn’t trying to trick a service into promoting you, any more than a well written article is trying to trick a human reader into understanding you. That’s the goal for everyone.
(Conversely, consider tactics like keyword stuffing as being somewhat on par with sensationalized headlines or clickbait titles. It feels like someone is trying to cheat their way into getting your attention, and while it isn’t wrong or bad per se, you’ll probably actively ignore things that look fishy)
Headers
If you’ve taken any kind of reading or studying course, you might be familiar with the concept of ‘skimming’. This involves letting your eyes scan over a piece of text, picking up bold or highlighted text, titles, and words that happen to stand out to you. This is very much what google does, and it appreciates the use of headers for the same reason we do: It tells us what the writer considers to be the most important portions of a text.
Just as you might be irritated at a piece of content having seemingly random words highlighted, using headers incorrectly causes google to give up and consider your content to just not make sense in that way. You get nothing out of it, google gets nothing out of it, and it’s less likely to show it to people because it’s confusing.
Keywords
How do you know what a piece of writing is about? Usually, we look for context clues such as recurring words or phrases. To clearly communicate to google what your content is about, the best strategy is to pick a few words (5 to 10, perhaps) and use them consistently.
Keyword Difficulty
The more people who use each keyword, the larger pool of potential content google needs to sort from first to last when someone does a search. Because of this, avoid adding your content to too large of a pool, and instead try and focus on multiple keywords that have less competition for top rankings. Of course, this means that the average user has to be searching for something more specific in order for your content to show up at all (generic terms are massive pools for a reason), but consider whether they’re really going to scroll through 47 pages of content to find your diamond in the rough otherwise. Either way, it’s a compromise.
Links
Anchor text is what you read when you see a link. Usually, it’s the address of the website you’re going to, but it doesn’t have to be. Any “click here!” links you’ve seen are using anchor text, but they’re not making particularly good use of it. Would you open an email that just said “click here!” with no information? Possibly not. Anchor text is a way to reinforce to google the subject you’re talking about, as well as convey some information to the human reader about what to expect.
Think of linking as a promotion of someone’s content, or perhaps the recommendation blurbs from famous authors on the cover of a book. You’re staking your reputation with Google into saying “this website is pertinent, and should be shown to other people”. If it’s a lower-ranked website, that can come back on you a little bit, just like someone who recommends every book they read, regardless of quality. At some point, you stop taking their suggestions as deeply to heart.
One way to get around that is to put a special tag in your links that tells it that you’re citing a source, rather than making a recommendation. It doesn’t convey any benefit to the site you’re linking to, and doesn’t stake any of your reputation on the quality of it.
Image Optimization
It might sound odd, but a great way to think about image optimization is to think of it like learning to cite your sources in an essay. What’s the purpose of citation when you’re including images in a composition? To tell the reader what the image is about, where it came from, and why they should care.
File name, Image Title and Image Description:
Imagine you’re filing and someone sends you a folder marked with a random string of text, dates or numbers and “version 2” all strung together with dashes or underscores. You go to look for a description of the packet, and that section is empty, Would that make your job easier or harder in trying to figure out what’s in it and where it belongs?
It’s important to provide clear file names and titles (a good rule of thumb is a 1–2 word description of the image and 2–3 relevant keywords) and a short, succinct description of what’s going on in the image and how it relates to your content.
Alt Titles and Descriptions
Good for Google, good for people with accessibility issues, good for you
Alt tiles and alt descriptions are so underutilized. Even putting aside SEO for a moment, these are what accessibility tools like screen readers take from to help people with impaired vision interact with a website. A good meta description is a short, concise summary of what the page is going to contain. There is some indication that Google doesn’t use the meta description to inform page ranking, but even if that’s currently true, google adjusts their algorithm constantly and meta fields are an obvious place to take from. Note: Alt text is required under the American Disabilities Act for individuals who are unable to view images themselves.
So, if you’re an English lit major, does that mean you’re automatically an SEO whiz? Probably not, Search Engine Optimization is its own area of expertise. But hopefully this article helps reframe common optimization tactics from something confusing and threatening to something that makes sense and follows a clear, logical process.
Did any of this spark your interest, or help you rethink an SEO technique or strategy? Share your thoughts in the comments, and as always, make sure to check out CodeDesign for all your web design, SEO and digital marketing needs.
