If you’re new to blogging and websites, there are many things you need to learn but one of the most important is search engine optimization, or SEO. While there are many ways to improve SEO, I’m sharing beginner tips for SEO that you can start implementing today, without any special skills or knowledge.
SEO is crucial for every website because it’s how people will find you and your posts online. If no one ever sees your site, all the hard work you put into it will be for nothing.
Beginner Tips for SEO
Use an SEO Plugin
A plugin like Yoast SEO will show you exactly what you need to do for proper SEO. You’ll see where you should put keywords, if you’ve overdone the keywords, if you need to break up your sentences into shorter sentences, and much more. It will guide you through headers and everything else you need for proper SEO. It’s like a cheat sheet with every post you write.
Write Regularly
It’s also essential that you post regularly to your blog and keep your website up to date. When you have fresh, updated content, it keeps your site fresh in the search engine results. You also want to publish regularly so that your readers will have a reason to keep coming back.
Link to Your Other Pages
You can link to previous content and other pages on your site. Linking is a crucial part of SEO. While you want to link to high-quality sites and pages, linking often and throughout your pages is important.
If you are a nonprofit and regularly share client stories, you should be linking to other pages that explain your services. Your services pages would link back to your client stories and also to your donation page.
Optimize for Length
The length of your post is also important but it’s hard to know exactly how long is best. Many SEO experts believe that Google likes long content, well over 1,000 words. However, if it’s too long, you might lose your human readers. If you make pieces longer than 800-1,000 words, it’s imperative to break up the text with smaller paragraphs and subheadings to make it easier to read. Every part of your blog posts and landing pages should be filled with relevant information. Please don’t make it longer unless the information you are providing adds value.
When creating long-form content that is meant to provide everything your reader would need to know on the subject, organizing the flow of content will help your reader stay engaged. On a page created for a nonprofit about its refugee program, we carefully crafted the page to take readers on a journey through the most important information they needed to know first, then next, and finally wrapped it up with a F.A.Q. section. It follows the following format.
- Program description and history
- Facts and data
- Location-specific information
- General information and how people can get involved
- Success Stories
- Information about similar programs
- Frequently Asked Questions
Use Headings
Headings and subheadings are important because they make your content easier to read. These breaks in text create “white space” on the page and make it easier for the reader to scan the page. It’s more difficult to read on an electronic screen than from printed material so headings help ease that strain on the eyes and make it easier for people to scan.
On the refugee program page mentioned above, we use headings strategically so that readers can find exactly what they need.
Now that you know these beginner tips for SEO, you can start applying them to your website right now. If you’ve already published, it’s a great time to do an audit and make corrections to pages and posts that you may have missed with SEO.