Basic SEO for the Complete Beginner

If you think it’s odd that I’m posting about SEO, don’t blame me: it’s ircurt‘s fault. He told me to do it. I’m taking the Nuremberg defence: I was just following orders.

SEO is, of course “Search Engine Optimisation”. It’s a complex set of skills that, when applied to your writing and your site, make your work look much more attractive to Google (specifically, although the same goes for most search engines).

The ultimate goal of SEO depends on how you look at it. If you’re a writer, the goal is to make your work more visible to the search engines and thus rank higher, so that visitors who are looking for the subjects you write about can find your work easily.

If you’re a marketing whore, the goal is to reach the top spot on Page 1 of Google’s results for absolutely anything anyone might type to find your product or service.

Before we start, I want to say two things:

Disclaimer: my regular visitors know that I don’t do SEO or marketing if I can avoid them. Consequently, I know about as much about SEO as I do about the Second World War. That means “enough to hold a reasonably intelligent conversation but not a great deal more”.

This entry covers the real basics and nothing beyond: if you’re considering a career as an SEO writer or want to use it on your own site to improve traffic, go read Peter Hoggan instead. He’s very good. Seriously.

Caveat: I’m assuming you don’t own the site you’re writing for so you’re only concerned about SEO in your articles – the page content, not site structure, semantics, meta, image alt tags and other such fun things.

Page relevancy

That phrase isn’t mine: I’d have used “relevance”, of course. This is the expression search engines use for how relevant the content of your work is to the person searching. It’s a primary factor in determining where you rank on search results.

To understand this, imagine you’re looking to sell your unwanted DVDs. You’re not going to go to Google and type in “buy a dog”; you’ll type something like “sell old used second-hand films DVDs”. This is called a keyphrase (again, a search engine term – it’s two words in proper English).

The keyphrase is used to search Google’s index of web pages and figure out which are most likely to provide the thing you want.

In the DVD search example, a good page is likely to contain sentences like “If you’d like to sell your old DVDs…” and “You can use this site to sell of your used films and earn extra money from unwanted DVDs“.

I’ve highlighted the bits of the keyphrase to show you why Google considers it a good choice: it contains words that you entered in your search.

Note that most search engines will rank an exact match higher than a partial match. So, for example, if your site included the expression “sell old used second-hand films DVDs” (which it shouldn’t, since it’s not normal English), it would rank higher for the above search than the ones with sentences that match individual words in the search phrase.

Also, bear in mind that graphic text (i.e. replacing a typed title with a pretty image that says the same thing) is not scanned by the standard web crawler: using graphic text reduces your SEO efficiency and therefore the page’s popularity.

Link popularity carries great weight in determining page popularity and relevance but that’s not an issue when you’re writing for a client’s site.

Keyword research

Unless you’re working for someone who decides what keywords (another term for keyphrases) they want included in your content, you’ll have to do some research to figure out the best phrases to use.

Generally, individual keywords aren’t used: a single word like “DVDs” returns hundreds of millions of pages and, to be honest, no one goes to Google and types a single word in the search box. Or if they do, they soon correct the mistake and type more.

Consequently, you should consider phrases of 3-5 words that the people you want to attract are likely to type to find your article, in the same way as the example above.

Google provides a keyword research tool for free, as do many other sites. You’ll need to take a logical approach to working out what keyphrases you want to use.

1. Think about how you would search for your own content.
2. Note down phrases you’d use.
3. Try them on Google – you’ll probably think of more phrases.
4. Go back to step 1 with different ways to search.

Keyword research isn’t difficult but it can be long. There are factors like local spelling to consider (the American use of ‘z’ as opposed to the British ‘s’ in words like ‘optimise’, for example) as well as how competitive certain phrases are. You’re much less likely to rank highly for terms with very competitive (i.e. popular) keywords than you are on the less-common ones.

One vital part of keyphrase research is synonyms: in the DVD example, “used”, “second-hand” and “old” are all synonyms – the words mean almost the same thing for the people looking for this content. You can use this to your advantage in creating content by varying your sentences to include each one instead of repeating the same thing over and over.

Keyword density

The number of times you use a keyphrase in your content determines your keyword density. Using 3 keywords in 100 words of text is a density of 3%. Actually it’s a bit more complicated than that with multi-word phrases, exact matches and so on, but I won’t go into the complexities here.

There’s still some argument about the ideal keyword density for SEO but most people agree it falls somewhere between 2% and 20%. Yes, that’s a big difference. In most cases, people aim for between 3% and 7%.

SEO copy

This is the crunch. Assuming you have your keyphrases sorted out and have decided the density you want, you now need to write the content.

There are some critical factors that affect SEO writing, especially after Google’s Panda update:

1. Make sure the copy is readable. Repeating gibberish sentences just to include keywords does not sit well with Google. Don’t spam keywords.
2.  Make sure the copy is informative.
3. Make sure the copy is the first thing on the page after the title: including tables, images or <div> tags can negate your hard SEO work.
4. Keep the paragraphs short and easy to scan – they’re more inviting that way and, once the visitor is hooked, they’ll take the time to read properly.
5. Use plain English unless the content is literary or requires technical terms. Here’s a wonderful phrase from Mr. Hoggan’s course: “Grandiloquence, digression and circumlocution are superfluities that epitomise impenetrable online prose!”
6. Use keywords for on-site links wherever possible: search engines love this.

A little SEO trick

As you know, I don’t really do SEO. I have, however, dabbled occasionally (on demand) for individual clients and picked up a neat trick along the way that I’d like to share.

Don’t think of the keyphrase as a single block of text.

Huh? Is that it? Yes – but allow me to show you how this simple idea can turn shoddy SEO writing into normal, quality writing.

For this example, I’ll use the phrase “cash buyers property”. This is something a person might type into Google to find a company that’ll buy their property for cash but it’s horrible English¹. The site owner will include the phrase in meta tags and stuff but they might ask you to include it in your writing as an exact phrase.

How on earth can you do that without typing something awful? Treat it as two parts: “cash buyers” and “property”. How about “[...] looking for cash buyers. Property owners who need [...]“?

Now here’s the thing: including the full stop and breaking the phrase across two sentences doesn’t matter to SEO. I’m going to say this in italics so you remember it because it’s quite simply the best thing I’ve learned about SEO writing:

Unlike me, search engines do not care about punctuation or capitalisation.

The web crawlers see “cash buyers property” in the same way as “cash buyers. Property”. Isn’t that awesome?

Note: there are, as far as I can tell, only three punctuation marks that web spiders care about: the at sign (@) which frequently denotes an email address, the hyphen (-) and the apostrophe (‘). Use those with care.

Is that it?

Oh, my goodness, no. Absolutely not. SEO is a complicated subject and, as I mentioned at the start, this is only the most basic of basic information.

Hopefully it’ll help you produce content that attracts more traffic.

Do you have any neat SEO tips and tricks to share? Leave me a comment!

¹ Incidentally, isn’t it awful how so many people think that’s acceptable English? They’ve read SEO phrases like that so many times, their brain just filters out the enormity of it.