Blogging: Make Search Engines Love You!
Create SEO friendly content and hone in on your keywords
“What SEO keywords should I use?” has become a cubical question to ask in business blogging. We can no longer install a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plugin and add an exhaustive list of words to every page of our blog. With each of Google’s releases on how it produces search results, it has become increasingly clear that quality is favored over keyword vomit.
Since Siri’s creation, there has been a fast forward movement into search constituting complete sentences. This is to say that search is now conversational. For example, “Where is the nearest gas stations?” or “How do I bake a potato?”
When brainstorming how to show up in front of our target audiences, we must consider entire questions that people are typing into Google. This is substantially more difficult and yes, it does make this process a lot more specific, however, it provides higher quality content coming up in search results to truly fulfill what a user is looking for. If I type in “blogs more followers” into Google, I will have to wade through a pretty substantial amount of results. If I enter “How to gain more followers on my blog”, I will now receive much more relevant results with the implementation of Hummingbird to search entire sentences.
Before you implement any kind of SEO strategy, look for a Hummingbird webinar or in-depth article to truly understand what it is Google is looking for. As of right now, there are over 200 variables that Google considers when ranking search results. Find out what the top ten are and focus on them. I can tell you right now that quality matters! More specifically, frequency, freshness, uniqueness, and value-added are high priorities for Google right now.
Once you are equipped with an overview of how search results will be produced, sit down with your team and re-strategize your SEO. Re-do your list of keywords into keyphrases. Go into your blog and make the titles of your pages and entries the key questions and sentences that you previously brainstormed. Continue tagging your entries, but I invite you to tag with more purpose this time around. Write pieces and produce content that truly answer your followers’ questions in order to provide the highest value.
Last little tip: get a Google My Business profile. Fair or not, Google has made it clear they favor content and companies that have Google+ pages. Once you publish a blog post, either copy/paste it onto your Google+ page or write a summary and provide a link to the original blog post. This should boost your engagement numbers.
Have other insight, questions or suggestions? Share them with us and our community in the comments below!