1. Pick a good keyword to focus on.
The first step is to
simply pick the search term or phrase you want the post to show up for.
If I am writing about the best dog toys for small dogs, I'll want to
find out what people are
actually searching for.
The easiest way to do this is use
Google Keyword Planner,
a free tool that will show you an estimate for any search phrase.
(Although Keyword Planner is free, you may need to set up an AdWords
account to gain access.)
For example, I noticed that "small dog
toys" receives 590 monthly searches -- higher than any other related
combination of words. However, I'm still not totally ready to start
writing about this topic. First, I need to do some research.
2. Research the competition.
Now that I have a term I want to try to rank for, I'm going to go undercover and do some recon!
Jump
over to your "private browsing" mode on your web browser ("Incognito"
in Chrome, "Private" in Safari and Firefox, "InPrivate" on Internet
Explorer) and head to Google.com. (At my company, we do "private mode"
because we don't want Google to use our past search history to
influence what we see on the search results page.)
Take a look at
all the content on page one of Google, ignoring any ad results at the
top. The 10 (or so) results are your competition! What are they missing?
Can you do better?
3. Write the best content.
Now that
you know what your competition looks like, it's time to create the
content that is going to blow those folks out of the water. This is
perhaps the most difficult part, but it's the most important. It needs
to be
amazing.
I don't care if you are creating a blog
post, ecommerce store page or sales-landing page. It needs to be better
than the rest, or else neither Google nor your audience will ever take
note.
For an example of an article I recently wrote -- with just this goal in mind -- check out "How to Become a Millionaire: The Ultimate Guide.". My goal with that post was to write superb content about that topic. How did I do?
Related: 5 Ways Small Businesses Can Compete With Giants in SEO
4. Put the keyword in your page title.
This
should be a no-brainer, but I'll say it anyway: Your page title should
contain your keyword, but that doesn't mean it has to be exact (though
it can be).
Additionally, the title must also be interesting
enough that people will actually want to click on it! A good example of
this would be PT from PTMoney.com, who wrote a great post about "making
extra money." However, rather than a boring title, like "Make Extra
Money," he titled it "
52 Ways to Make Extra Money." Now
that is something I would want to read.
5. Put the keyword in your header.
You
can organize most webpages by having a large title at the top, followed
by several sub-headers throughout the page (like the sub-headers in
this post).
This organization is helpful not only for people in
skimming blog-post articles, it's helpful in showing Google exactly what
your blog post is about. Therefore, be sure to use your exact keyword
phrase at least once in your sub-headers.
6. Put the keyword in the name and alt-tag of your image.
Next,
if your blog post contains images, you can use those images to cement
the idea to Google about your post's topic. There are two ways to do
this:
- The image name
- The image alt tag
To
change the image name, simply change the name of the image on your
computer before uploading. Instead of a file called "2831274.jpg," you
can re-name it something like "small dog toys 1.jpg."
The "alt
tag" is something you designate after you upload the photo to your
website. Without getting too technical, the alt tag is simply the text
that the web browser will show if the photo can't load for some reason.
7. Use the keyword in the URL and in the post.
Another
way Google is able to determine what your blog post is about is the
URL. In other words, we're talking about what comes after the ".com" in
your url (or .net, .org, or whatever you use). For example, which of the
following URLs do you think Google will like better when deciding
whether or not to show a certain page?
- www.ExampleDogToyWebsite.com/9124824834-1
- www.ExampleDogToyWebsite.com/small-dog-toys
You're
right if you guessed the second one. While the former might not
completely kill your SEO efforts, the latter definitely helps show
Google exactly what the post is about.
8. Insert internal links.
If
you aren't talking about your best content, why should anyone else
care? For this reason, it's important that your best SEO content be
linked to
internally by other pages on your website.
Yes, this means you may need to go back and edit some older posts to include links to the new, incredible content.
9. The most-important SEO tip: Get external links.
Okay, finally we're finally at the
big one: external links.
External links are links from websites other than your own. Google relies
heavily on
external links to determine how good a post is. And this makes sense,
doesn't it? You can talk about yourself and your own skills all day
long, but no one will believe you. But as soon as other people begin
bragging about you, others take notice.
While producing incredible content
may get
you some links, the truth is, you are going to have to do some "link
building." This means reaching out to other website owners in the space
to ask for links.
