As it usually happens in other occasions, also in the subject of SEO of a blog things can be much simpler if you know how to simplify them to get to the essence of the problem.
For this, there is nothing better than a practical and real exercise on how to do it.
So that’s what today’s post is all about.
We will see what are the SEO techniques that we apply in Citizen 2.0 and, if possible, even more important: what is the process we follow when writing a post to achieve a good web positioning of it.
5 basic SEO techniques to get a good positioning of your website
You will see that they are very simple techniques and that, despite this, they should not be totally wrong because in a year and a half we have already achieved tens of thousands of visits per month on the blog.
I strongly recommend you to apply them whenever you can because, well applied, they will have a great impact on your blog or any other type of web you want to position.
Why do you want a blog or a website if nobody sees it?
These techniques for positioning (or SEO) in Google, since it is the dominant search engine and practically a monopoly in the Spanish-speaking area in which the % of other search engines is almost zero.
Before each post, we follow the following 5 steps to take care of the SEO of the content and, despite what it may seem, it is a process that usually takes no more than 5 or 10 minutes.
- Focus the topic and identify keywords
Once the idea for the post starts to be more or less mature, it’s time to find the keywords that describe what the content of the post in question is about.
In my case, what I usually do is to write them down on paper as they occur to me. And, in some things, I still prefer the 1.0 world…
I always try to make sure that the selection of keywords follows the following guidelines:
That they are “powerful”: Keywords that describe the subject well, but that nobody uses to search, are of no interest.
That they are natural: Do not take the above to absurd extremes that make the content (especially the title) look “weird”, but simply make a little effort to find the right words.
That they are consistent in my niches: It makes no sense to give in each post with the lame-words if in each post you touch a different niche. This way you will never position yourself in any of them. It’s all about focusing on the thematic niches in which you want to position yourself. And that means crushing your main keywords.
For example: in this post, the most obvious keywords are “SEO” and “blog”. Despite the obvious, when making the post I didn’t realize right away that “SEO” was another interesting keyword (in fact, very interesting as we will see later).
Less obvious is the keyword “techniques”, but it is a very interesting generic keyword because it allows to enter very well in specific niches (“5 techniques for X”, “The best techniques for Y”, …).
In fact, it would have been somewhat better to talk about “5 steps” (because it reflects a little better the nature of the process described in this post) instead of “5 techniques”.
But the combination “SEO techniques” is searched a lot more than the combination “SEO steps” (now we see how to know this), so I discarded the latter in favor of the former.
This case is a good example that there is no need to change words to optimize SEO, there is no artificial or “ugly” title for making this change.
- Filtering with a keyword tool
It is normal that I have a lot more keywords than I can use in the following phases. You can use 3 or 4 at the most and, however, many times I have more than 10 candidates.
So it’s time to filter and discard.
For this I used a magic tool which is the AdWords Keyword Tool.
What I did is to see with this tool how many searches these keywords receive and their most relevant combinations. Also, tested with some synonym to see if I get more searches, etc.
But once I realized how important it is to get positioned in the niches that interest you, I decided to take the leap to the next level and since then I use a professional tool which is SEMrush, considered by many the best tool on the market today.
With a tool like this you simply go to another level, you can do incredible things far beyond analyzing niches. You can do things like, for example, go to a competitor’s website and find out what keywords they’ve tried to rank for, what positions they’re in, etc. This alone is an incredible shortcut to finding good keywords and justifies spending some money on this.
When analyzing keywords with a good tool very curious things come out, for example, in this post by Raquel, she had intuitively leaned to talk about “synchronize files” when it turns out that the keywords “synchronize files” multiply by more than 25 the number of searches?
Who would have thought it? I would have bet, if anything, that it would be the other way around.
On the other hand, this sometimes identifies good keywords that I hadn’t thought of and/or even detects new interesting niches. In this post I put SEO as the tool suggested me “seo positioning”. Thanks to this I realized that I had forgotten the word “positioning” and the combination “web positioning”, both very powerful.
- Design the title
In the title of this step I have put “design” and not “write” very consciously for two reasons:
Because the title is the most important part of your whole post to place the keywords you have identified before (although with Google you never know…). Therefore, you have to make a real effort to “design” the title to get the most out of the keywords.
Because people, as David Cantone comments here, hardly put any effort into titles. So using the word “design,” in a way, highlights that this is an important thing. You should not settle for the first title that comes your way, and not only for SEO, but also because with the title you risk to be read or not.
The most important SEO principles I follow when designing a title (although not always) are the following:
Write titles that attract the attention of the target reader using copywriting techniques.
Try to include at least three or four of the keywords.
Try to place the words at the beginning as much as possible.
Try to make the title as “efficient” as possible. This does not necessarily mean short, but to reduce to the essential minimum the words that do not add value at SEO or copywriting level.
See if it is possible to use some of the magic words and/or emotional factors of copywriting.
Trying to improve it a little, these could be some changes (subjective and opinionated, of course):
“Practical things” is not bad, but it surely has more hook to talk about “benefits” (copywriting) and, besides, it leaves the title a bit shorter (SEO + copywriting).
The SEO of “synchronizing files” is very bad (nobody searches using gerunds), much better “synchronize files”.
We have already seen that using the synonym “files” instead of files multiplies searches by a factor of more than 25… Therefore, a change that does not present headaches.
So, for now, we are left with:
“11 Benefits of syncing your files in the cloud with DropBox or SugarSync.”
Not bad already. Also, if you notice, with the change we’ve managed to bring the most important keywords, “sync files” more to the beginning of the sentence. This is not only good for SEO, but also for copywriting (that the reader sees what the content is about as soon as possible).
From a pure SEO point of view it might be better to remove the “your” as well, but from a copywriting point of view it was better to keep a language that addresses the reader directly. In this case, the second criterion prevailed over the first.
However, the final title has remained as follows:
“11 Benefits of syncing your files with SugarSync or DropBox.”
Why?
Very simple, because thanks to the WordPress SEO plugin we quickly saw that the title appeared trimmed in the search results, thus losing the keyword “DropBox”, losing the title quite effectively.
So we decided to leave out the keywords “the cloud” in the title because we considered them less important than “DropBox”. Note, however, that the word “cloud” does appear in the URL.
And that wraps up the title.
Did we get the optimal formula right in this particular example? No idea, you never know until a few months pass and you see how the post is positioning.
What you have to do is look at the big numbers to see how your policies are working and in our case they seem to indicate that, at least in general, we are not completely wrong.
Anyway, remember that it’s not about winning awards for perfect SEO, it’s about getting a reasonable approximation in a bounded amount of time. A process like this, with a little practice, you can easily do it in 5 or 10 minutes maximum.
- Writing the content and subtitles
It is good to have the title before the content because it is much easier to meet the expectations you have created with it.
If you write the title after the fact, everything becomes much more difficult and artificial because you have to accommodate the title to the content when it should be the other way around, and remember: 80% of the reading of your post depends on the title.
In the content it is good to follow the classic structure of the “three acts”. Applied to a post it would be the introduction, development of the post topic and the conclusion.
It is obvious that in the introduction it is very convenient to focus on the reader’s expectations, which usually goes hand in hand with using keywords with special intensity in this part.
In the rest of the content you should systematically repeat the keywords. It is generally agreed that a keyword density of 1 to 100 (one keyword or keyword combination per 100 normal keywords) is a good ratio. It is not advisable to overdo it either, from more or less 3 or 4 keywords per 100 you enter the red zone in which Google can interpret that there is an excess that responds to an attempt of manipulation and it can happen that it applies the consequent penalties.
- URL and “alt” tags of the images
The last step is already very simple, it is simply to create the URL by hand, that is, do not use the URL that WordPress generates automatically, but edit it by hand for which you must be logically using the WordPress permalinks or the platform you use.
We use one of the best practices: compose the URL of the keywords of the post, separated by hyphens. You can easily see it in all our URLs.
According to Google, it is advisable to use no more than 4 or 5 keywords, which seems logical because it doesn’t make much sense to think of a post with 10 keywords. It doesn’t make sense to have such a scattered content on different fronts.
An additional little trick we use is to take advantage of the “alt” tags of the images (“alternative text” field in the WordPress image editing window). Google takes them into account for searches (especially for image searches, naturally) and therefore we also take advantage of these tags to “sneak in” keywords when it makes sense (i.e. when it makes sense for the image in question).
