How to Improve Your SEO? (Part 1)

by Carson
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SEO is Important

Believe it or not, lots of people know about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), as long as they are writing websites. But, some do not know how to improve their SEO, so let’s get started! To learn more, please go to Yoast4 or Google Search Console Help5.

First, how does Google search work?

That may seem simple because it only takes a fraction of a second to find the optimized content on Google, but it actually isn’t. Servers around the world create search results. After all, there are more than 1 billion sites worldwide, so how does Google find the best, or a more straightforward question: How does Google search work?

It turns out that Google uses the robots.txt to “crawl” pages. If you are curious, please visit our website’s robots.txt6. Only pages that aren’t disallowed can be present in the search results. See how many Google pages are blocked in the search results7? They will not appear even if you copy the URL in the search box. Other than the robots.txt filtration, Google won’t crawl sites that require a login either. That means it won’t crawl a Gmail inbox, right?

For more information, please go to Google Search Console’s How Google Search Works8.

So, how to improve SEO?

It turns out that it is effortless. If you make a website with WordPress9, you will probably have installed Yoast SEO. This tool can give you tips for improving your SEO, including your readability. To improve SEO, you need to optimize your:

Content
Images
Readability
Promotion
Traffic
Mobile-friendliness
Robots.txt
Headlines

et cetera……

Content

Readability

Would you like to read an article that has unorganized, messy content? That is the importance of readability! If sentences are too long, readers will possibly not understand that and think the idea is unclear. So, shorten your sentences, and make your concept clear and concise.

Also, avoid using too many specialized words. Readers may not know about that unless you use simpler vocabularies, describe the complicated word, or make a glossary. Furthermore, preventing grammatical and spelling mistakes are also a vital aspect, and don’t write articles containing too much content as they can bore the readers and make them give up.

If your page has good readability results, visitors will stay on the site for longer, and you’ll get more traffic, which increases SEO.

Originality

In addition, originality is ideal for SEO. If you copy large amounts of text from famous sites, it might impact your SEO since they aren’t original, and they have a much stronger competitor. Also, copied contents may be dangerous if you don’t cite them properly. It could get you into trouble through plagiarism!

So, create original content! It will be attractive to readers because they want to look at well-organized or unprecedented ideas!

Links

Also, links and where you put them are essential for your SEO. Do you remember to cite while you write? You need to link your credits for visitors to click and know more! Moreover, linking to others can help their SEO because search engines think they are used by a website! Internal links are also useful for SEO because they navigate users between pages on your website and let the search engine know that your article is quite meaningful!

Although links are beneficial, they can be harmful to SEO if you use the wrong anchor text. What’s anchor text? It’s the words that are attached to a hyperlink. Please avoid using anchor text like “page” or “article” without a description. If you do that, readers will be confused and may find this page suspicious. Thus, please effectively show the topic, or copy the title from the target webpage.

Be Careful with your links!

It will help if you are careful with links, whether you’re the visitor, or the article’s author. Don’t link sites without HTTPS10 because they are unsafe and non-reliable. Moreover, if you don’t want your search engine to look at your link, set it to “nofollow”.

Be exceptionally attentive to shortened links like Bitly links. You can’t know about the target of the link directly. Fortunately, though, if you copy the link address and add a “+” sign for Bitly links, like in this Google Search Console link11, you can know where you’re clicking.

So, for now, that’s enough for today. Next time, we’ll talk more about how to improve your SEO in Part 2.

References, Credits, and Links

  1. (n.d.). Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide – Google Search Console Help. Retrieved November 1, 2020, from https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en
  2. (2020, August 7). Internal linking for SEO: Why and how? • Yoast. Retrieved November 1, 2020, from https://yoast.com/internal-linking-for-seo-why-and-how/
  3.  (2018, February 15). Do outbound links matter for SEO? • Yoast. Retrieved November 1, 2020, from https://yoast.com/outbound-links/
  4. https://yoast.com
  5. https://support.google.com/webmasters
  6. https://www.centralgalaxy.com/robots.txt
  7. https://www.google.com/robots.txt
  8. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/70897/?hl=en
  9. https://www.wordpress.com
  10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTPS
  11. https://bitly.com/3oh2lqN+

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