Thanks to the rocket-speed growth of social media platforms, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a crucial role in writing. Writing is a means of communication conveying what is in your mind to others and making your ideas understood. It’s one of two ways of communication: writing and speaking, which students learn from an early stage. Hence, netizens need to express themselves concisely, clearly, and understandably on social media. Furthermore, the progress of informatics technology has developed many types of social media platforms at rocket speed. Consequently, netizens have many means to share their information, experiences and feelings. In addition to good expression, it requires attraction to the target audience. The trend of remote work has grown across the world, which has restricted human interaction.

The change in social trends has formed emerging professions where writing is a pre-condition, including copywriting, content writing, reviews, etc. And the demand for this profession has increased ceaselessly down the road. Businesses and organizations need to advertise their products and services. Or they release their information and news to their target audience. Additionally, thousands of online courses in this industry are available to help would-be writers upscale their levels before entering this industry. Therefore, joining the Yoair blog is a great way to help you with two critical points: writing practice and SEO. The latter is a primary takeaway you need if you want to pursue your writing as a career. The following is to help you know more about SEO to give your content the edge over others’ ones in search engines.

Why is search engine optimization important?

Search engine optimization comes with a practical tool to raise brand awareness, and build links with prospects. As a result, it turns you into a high-quality expert in the industry. You may read SEO a hundred times through reading materials that define it as a necessary digital marketing tool. But do you have an in-depth understanding of SEO? And how to apply it to your writing effectively and efficiently? Even if you grasp the primary use of SEO, you can’t go through a complex process perfectly and smoothly. That’s why you need to learn about SEO.

In the digital world, it’s more important than ever to get content found online. You see as many websites as people on the globe. It means more difficulty for you to cut through the noise. So getting a high rank on page one of search engine results becomes harder. Thus, users recognize quality content and websites more than ever to read and interact with. The source, BrightEdge, reveals the percentage of online experiences involving search as follows:

The majority of online experiences involve search. Credit: Hubspot’s photo

How does the Internet look like a city?

In order to grasp the understanding and operation of the Internet, you first learn the way the Internet works. First of all, the easily understood picture is that the Internet looks like a shelter. Next, you put a massive collection of pages in the shelter. Links have a role in connecting them. Then, on a larger scale, please look at the inside of a house; each room represents a single webpage on the site.

The hallways and stairs connect rooms, meaning internal links between the pages. And a street accommodates many houses outside a house, as lots of different websites contain pages. Towns have developed into a city and get linked together by roads. Websites have grown, connected by external links. So, much-visited websites are like shopping malls or business centres with many streets or highways.

What’s SEO?

According to Moz, SEO helps increase the traffic to a website through organic search engine results in terms of quantity and quality. In the past, SEO was a practice of keyword insertion. But now, search engines are more intelligent and skilful at identifying relevant content for users. Google’s goal is to serve its users with the best results or satisfying experiences when they search for answers to their questions. Keep in mind that you need to focus on the ease of the users and search engines crawling your website. You try to write high-quality content, but no one will read it if you can’t make your website optimized for search on Google.

What does Google care about?

Google’s goal is to respond to a user’s search or question. Google crawls with its algorithm to match the search with content on your page. So your website wins if it shows up on page one of the search engine results. Consequently, the page displays links to sites that closely match the user’s search. Still, Google has non-stop developed a system to evaluate websites. Thanks to this growth, the search engine provides the perfect match for every query. Also, Google uses logic to parse search terms, leading to an increasing challenge you’ll have with producing high-quality content.

In addition, Google focuses on three essential elements: expertise, authority, and trust (E-A-T). E-A-T plays a critical role in all queries. If you’re looking for a cute dog photo, E-A-T may not produce as much as you like because it’s subjective. Or if you’re searching for a recipe for a dish, E-A-T matters that much. And if Google had content on this issue compiled by an unknown writer and released on an untrustworthy website without authority, access to that content would be low.

Expertise

The word suggests a large scale of a writer’s knowledge or skill in a specific scope. It measures the professional level of content, not the website’s credit. Then, Google is searching for expert-crafted content. There are two types of writers: formal and less formal writers. According to Google quality rater guidelines, some writers craft blogs on travel, restaurants or reviews on topics they have in-depth experience with. Thus, their content gives real-life value, turning them into experts. They don’t need the educational background or professional pieces of training on the topics they focus on. The formal writer is a content creator with qualifications and education in medical, financial, law, etc. In other words, Google circles on YMYL pages (your money or your life). YMYL-related content includes the following:

• News and current events: Content covers technology, science, politics, business, and international events
• Civics, government, law: Pieces of information cover social services, public institutions, government agencies, political events, and legal advice
• Shopping: Pages feature product reviews, goods research, purchase-involved services
• Health and safety: Pages pertain to news or consultation on health, medical matters, hospitals, pharmacies, drugs, nutrition, and life-threatening issues.
• Groups of people: content circles on ethnicity, race, nationality, religion, age, disability, gender, and sexual orientation
• Human issues: education such as school or college research, housing, employment, fitness, and fashion

Authority

Authority implies the credit or reputation of experts or influencers in this industry. Thus, users view them as go-to guys or their websites as go-to sites. That’s authority. Authority means who you are, what you represent, and how your reputation is. For instance, if your content is about a community issue or forum discussion, its quality increases or decreases authority. In other words, credentials or personal experiences play a crucial role. Do reputation research of real users and experts to find a website, or review, references, and recommendations to identify a website. Also, Google mentions Wikipedia as one of the good sources of information. Wikipedia content provides you with a company’s profile, such as awards, recognition or even controversies.

Trustworthiness

Google refers to trust as legitimacy, transparency, and accuracy that the website or its content conveys to users. Trustworthiness measures the level of your website or content stands. Therefore, one of Google’s measures is to rate a website or content through backlinks. The more trustworthy the backlinks from a domain get, the higher trust Google rates the backlinks to a domain. Like a real person, Google is rating the trust of a website or content in the same way as you do. You trust someone if they repeatedly show themselves to be relied on.

How do the search engines rank your content?

When a user enters a query, the search engines look for the results that match the specific query. It shows a list of search results that provides the most appropriate content a user wants. That’s why a Search Engine works as a web-based tool. Then, it goes through the three following stages of search, analysis and ranking:

• Crawling/Discovery: It tinks from page to page, from website to website to identify readable content.
• Index/Relevance: It creates an index to store and organize content it finds during the crawling process.

• Ranking/Authority: It releases a list of content that contains the most appropriate information matching a user’s query after receiving a user’s entry.

The third stage is to select which content to feature. Ranking or authority means which content is the best seller or which content is easier to search for than others. However, the content that is discoverable for readers originates from credible sources. Three elements determine the authority:

• The content is read a lot.
• The content is mentioned a lot.
• The content is referred to in other content or gets backlinks.

For instance, an author receives a lot of readers’ popularity, a sea of word of mouth, and many reading materials get their work as a source. The author builds authority. Discovery, relevance and authority have a reciprocal relationship. Therefore, the content misses one of them, leading to a lower order. The content is authoritative but less relevant; the ranking is low. Or the content is relevant but less authoritative; the ranking is low. Or the content becomes less discoverable, leading to a low ranking in the last stage. In other words, discovery, relevance and authority play a crucial key role in SEO. Thus, we need a healthy SEO strategy.

How to create an SEO strategy

According to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the theory comprises five tiers: food and clothing (physiological), job security (safety), friendship (love, belonging), self-esteem, and self-actualization. We need to satisfy the initial stages before climbing up the higher tiers in human needs. In a similar vein, an SEO strategy needs to fulfil the lower tiers before coming up to the higher levels. Our website needs to be crawled and indexed before we craft gripping content. We need to write compelling content before choosing keywords. SEO strategies and tactics depend on what priority we want to circle around. However, the SEO strategies depend on three elements.

• How is our business established online?
• Which resources do we use to increase the level of SEO?
• What industry does our business belong to?

For instance, our business has already become famous, linked to a lot online. Thus, we already have a healthy position of search authority. That means we don’t need to spend as much time dedicated to authority. We want now to increase the relevance of content to be discoverable by search engines. The more content we craft, the more backlinks we get. If we don’t create authority for our website, the content can’t acquire as high a rank as we want. In one word, authority is closely attached to high-quality content and creating backlinks to it.

 What goals do we set for our website?

It’s not simply that we want to get a high rank for a certain keyword. Our website needs a goal and KPI. We have to define our goals for a website to focus on the following. They include organic traffic, the number of leads from our website, the design of a mobile-optimized website, or accessibility for those with disabilities. As you may know, SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. In other words, our goal must be clear, quantitative, concrete and fixed. SEO strategy is a long journey to attain our goal. So we should be thoughtful, patient, and realistic about what we have planned within a fixed timeframe.

What is a measurable factor in SMART goals?

We have to define KPIs for a measurable factor that depends on the status of our business. Key performance indicators are a critical tool for aiming at an intended result. These indicators include as follows:

• Organic traffic
• Keyword ranking
• Conversion rate
• Bounce rate
• Page load time
• Backlinks built

When we set out our goals for the website, we can define what KPIs will help us to follow up on our success. Keep in mind that there are specific KPIs and numbers based on our website. For instance, our business is a start-up, so we need to increase organic traffic by 30% over the next four quarters. To attain this target, we create a series of blog posts with target keywords to improve and optimize our images. We focus on end-users, learn about what they search on Google, and understand what they want from our business.

Also, we need a strong authority to get our content to a high rank in the search engine. The content requires the quantity and quality of backlinks. Backlinks list all websites linking to our content, pages, and website. We measure backlinks based on the following:

• The number of inbound links to our website.
• The number of unique domains that link to our website.
• The quality of those links.

We have some paid tools, like SEMrush, Majestic, and Ahrefs to help us analyze a backlink profile. They aren’t expensive and worth the price. Or we can use the free version of Moz, which gives a tool named Open Site Explorer. It provides us with a pretty good high-level view of our backlink profile.  For instance, you can know the number of unique websites linking to your pages, and web pages linking to your website.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this is a brief takeaway about SEO basics that gives you its general view. The article provides an SEO definition and describes how the search engine works after receiving a user’s query. Also, it gives you a concrete panorama of the SEO system that helps you grab SEO activities. To get a high rank in search engine results, you need a goal strategy that requires patience, thoughtfulness, and reality.