Five Essential Elements of Good SEO

There are five main components of SEO that a writer must keep in mind when writing for the web. Or rather, when writing any blog post, website article or copy that will be placed anywhere on the web – even though it is written for a human being to read. The truth is, if a writer does not have basic SEO techniques no one will find their blog post or article.

SEO Tip #1 Clear and Relevant Titles

If you ignore everything else in this post, please do not ignore this. You must have a clear and concise title. Otherwise it doesn’t matter how brilliant you are, no one will ever find your website except, perhaps, a handful of your close friends.

For example, I could have titled this blog post “Be Like the Pied Piper” – a clever twist of words referencing drawing a large amount of followers to your blog or website. However, if I were going to type in a search term into Google to find the information in this blog post, I would search “Good SEO Essentials”.  Therefore, those are the words that should be in my title. Google does not have much as a sense of humor, unfortunately.

See Kelby Carr’s (@TypeAMom) article for more details about SEO savvy titles.

SEO Tip #2 Introduce Your Topic Specifically

Unfortunately, most of today’s readers want to know what you are going to talk about and they want to know NOW. They will not spend two minutes (or two paragraphs) trying to figure out what your post is really about. They want to know whether it is going to tell them what they want to know. Soon. The first paragraph of your blog post should introduce your topic (and probably look very similar to your title) immediately. Be cute and witty later. After you’ve hooked your readers.

SEO Tip #3 – Focus The Topic of Each Post or Article

As @HeatherSolos pointed out at a Twitter Site-Warming Party, keeping a narrow, clear focus on each specific blog post will naturally produce strong keywords. There is a huge difference between writing about “Labor Pain” and writing about “Benefits of Massage During Labor” and “How to Use Massage During Labor“. Notice, those are two seperate articles. You can see how the keywords and keyword phrases fall naturally into place, because I have kept the focus of the article very specific.

SEO Tip #4 Use Subheadings To Increase SEO

As demonstrated in this blog post, subheadings are highly useful. They keep you tightly focus on your post topic because you can quickly tell by the subheading if you are veering off course. For example, if the subheading for this paragraph had said “Adding Affiliate Links to Your Blog”, but my title is about five basic SEO tips, than it is obvious I am moving off to a different topic.

Subheadings also break up the blog post, allowing readers to more easily skim your post and read online. If a block of text is too long, readers will give up before finishing your post. Subheadings also allow you to restate your keywords again. In the blog post I thought about using “Five SEO Tips” as the title, but instead chose to use that in my subheadings.

SEO Tip #5 Use Keywords Naturally

No one wants to sound like they are a robot spitting out keywords to serve Google Adsense. There are plenty of those types of websites out there for sure! But good, human-driven, high-quality content does not have to ignore search engine optimization – rather integrate it organically throughout the blog post or web article.

For example, in the Labor Massage article I mentioned above, the introduction could have said, “How my husband helped me while I was having my baby.” While that is certainly a valid introduction, you can see how this introduction, “Using massage to comfort a mother during her labor has been proven to help in many ways. See the benefits of touch for a birthing woman.” places several of the keywords and keyword phrases right at the top when readers are trying to figure out what the article references.

Remember to use good SEO techniques, even if they are just these five basics, when writing your blog posts and articles so you will be found by the readers you want to attract. Someone out there is looking for what you have to say – will they find you?

Additional Articles:

Why is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Important?

SEO Tips for Bloggers – Notes from a Conference Session I Taught