Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips for Your Posts on Steemit and Why You Need to Pay Attention

I have been working with getting search engines to pick up my writing for nearly a decade now. I don't do a lot of social media marketing because of assorted reasons (one of which is the low rating such traffic has with advertising services). Over those years of writing and trying to figure things out, I learned a few tricks. I am willing to share those tips here with my fellow Steemians, and the search engine traffic that takes the time to read this article (or any of my other tips articles). We are all in the same boat here on Steemit - we must succeed as a team working together rather than against.

First, keywords matter. They matter in your title and they matter in your content. As @whatageek has written about here and here, SEO is slightly complicated. You could spend years in school learning Search Engine Optimization (SEO) only to watch in horror as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Duck Duck Goose, and many others change their algorithms that compile results. When these changes are made, you can safely bet there is someone offering a new course on the changes, for a fee.

The basics of Search Engine Optimization are easy to comprehend. Whatageek already mentioned a great tip in how to title your article - use a style like what someone may search for. That is only part of the requirement to place well with Google, Bing, and the others. The body of your article is also extremely important.

The style of your article, the words used, is key in how Google and other search engines treat your work. If using a lot of informal words like “you”, “your”, “us”, etc then Google will treat the work different versus articles that are written without these words. Articles without informal conversational wording will be ranked differently versus articles that do use them. This is just natural selection and is an effortless way to “aim” your article for certain demographics. The audience you reach will be determined by the language used in your article. Businesses, students needing sources for term papers and the like will look for articles written differently than people just wanting to know the opinion on the latest television set or game. More on writing style will be linked to here.

Keywords are the base of SEO. Computers are just that, computers. They look for patterns in written words on-line and will act according to the programming they operate with at that time (this is the algorithm that the engines change regularly). If you "pad" your article with tons of keywords it could be dropped from results just like not having certain keywords appear enough in your article. The sweet spot for the last several years has been about 2.5 percent appearance of keywords. How do you know your keyword penetration? I am glad you asked, please check out the site at the link below.

http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/

Submit your article through that site and sit back and look at the results. Don't get scared by what you see. That is a lot of valuable information.

You will see a breakdown of the words in your article with their density. This is also for two and three word combinations that are popular. These are called "long tail keywords". Long tail keywords are simply phrases that go together quite well and are searched together a lot. Such as "what did X celebrity wear". Long tail keywords can be separated with up to two variables (here it is the "x celebrity"). Often though, long tail keywords are together. More on “long tail keywords” later (I will edit this article to include a link to that article).

For now, focus on what words in your article are above 2.5 percent. If these are natural words then you are fine. If they are a product or service name then there is a problem and your article could be hit by search engines for “padding” keywords.

Some words that are unavoidable to have in your article are considered “stop words”. These are words that the search engines put little value to such as this brief list:

a
about
above
across
after
afterwards
again
against
all
almost
alone
along
already
also
although
always
am
among
amongst
amoungst
amount
an
and
another
any
anyhow
anyone
anything

There are a ton more, a full list is available here. Keep in mind there is no complete list of stop words for any search engine. That is deeply guarded information that the public are not supposed to know (if we did, it would be easy to “game” the system and rank high consistently). The one place that you should avoid “stop words” is in your title, if possible.

Stop words have one benefit that programmers may understand. For the most part, anything in your title after a stop word is ignored by the search engines – just like commenting in your code. This means you can have a bit of fun after using a stop word or action (like a comma) that can potentially bring in more readers. This gives you the chance to be funny or witty with the second half of the title. Being witty in the full title may turn off readers. More on the way your article displays in search engines will be available in a later article (again, I will edit this article with links to that later).

The meat of your article should be a minimum of 300 words to be indexed properly by most search engines. There are rumors that Google will increase this minimum to 400 words sometime in the next year or two (before 2020 is the common cut off). The base is 300 for proper indexing but longer articles carry more weight for their topics. Ideally, 1,200 words with proper SEO, will often list higher with search engines. These longer articles are considered “experts” or “professional” level articles on the subject matter. This is what we all need to be aiming for, at least 300 words but as close to 1,200 words per article.

Search Engine Optimization is not a perfected skill. It takes playing around with things and testing the waters so to speak. I am no expert at SEO, I can only relay what I have learned over the years from personal experience. This stuff changes quite often. What I have detailed in this article has been the same for the last decade or so – not much has changed other than Google raising the minimum word count for indexing articles (ten years ago it was about 100 to 150 words and soon it could be 400).

Considering Google is the largest search engine available today, and they have quite a bit of power when you couple in their Page Rank service, AdSense, and other things that can benefit website owner. It behooves anyone wanting to rank with any search engine to aim for ranking quite well with Google. Other search engines often pull their methods based on what Google is doing – if Google is publicly blocking something, so will other search engines.

My apologies for repeatedly saying I will link to other articles that go into more detail throughout this article. That is simply because it is believed that 1,200 words is the maximum that readers will sit through with online content. Also, if I included all of those other articles here, it would be more like a term paper than an article on SEO. It just shows how complicated search engine optimization truly is.

If you have any questions, just ask away. I am fairly open about things. The only thing I will not give away is my rolodex of contacts or my template for guaranteed accepted press releases. I will cover images in a separate article, you guessed it, to be linked to here later.