How to Make the Most of SEO

www.seogazelle.com

SEO can seem remarkably daunting, especially when you’re unsure of exactly how it works (and are flanked on all sides by people telling you how important it is). While it’s not the most difficult core concept to understand (it’s just keywords, effectively) it can be frustrating figuring out exactly how best to map your website(s) for it. Well, as ever, we at Social Songbird are on hand to help.

Concision is Key

Whether you’re posting articles, image galleries, videos or whatever else, keep your titles and descriptions short and to-the-point. SEO is all about making your site material easy to find, but also easy to stumble across. You want people looking for things in your area to find you, not just people looking for you.

The easiest way to do this is to make all your titles a quick, punchy mix of the most pertinent keywords. Doing this will work both for your post titles and the permalinks. Try and aim for 60 characters or less. The important information will be in the actual post, your focus with the title is making it stand out.

Tagging, Tagging, Tagging

Most entry level web-hosting platforms are blog-based, and include a tagging component for new posts. This is really important for keeping your posts contextual and easy to find. There’s a common misconception that if you want to make a post stand out more, you overload it with hundreds of tags. For the love of God, don’t do that.

All you’ll achieve is that your posts will all become cluttered and mixed up, losing any sense of identity. You want people searching for a specific category to be met with only the most directly relevant posts, not literally all of them, it’s the equivalent of taking out a textbook and highlighting every single word. More to the point, try and use a maximum of 20-30 tags on your site, it keeps everything neat and specific. You want to create new content for your tags, not the other way around.

Insert Relevant Keywords Wherever You Can

This process starts with the more obvious, aforementioned places like titles, meta descriptions, tags and categories (and the actual post body) but it extends much further. Remember that SEO is like hash tagging without the hash, the more assertive, the better.

Images, for example, cram as many keywords as you can into the descriptive caption (within reason, it still has to make some semblance of sense), do the same with the actual filename and it’ll be much more likely to pop up in image searches. If you have a photograph of a specific type of guitar which uploads under the name ‘IMG0004’ for instance, change it to the exact make and model and boom, you’ve created another new gateway, even if the guitar isn’t strictly the focal point of the post.

When you share the posts on social media, lay on the keywords just as thick, that way you’re creating an outside possibility that even if your actual post doesn’t show up straight away in a search, your Facebook or Twitter share might.

Watch Your Stats like a Hawk

Most web-hosting platforms have a function that maps your traffic and relates it to how well mapped your posts are to SEO. If you’re using a host that doesn’t have it, move to a different one. You should be looking at your traffic stats regardless of SEO, but taking it into account is absolutely vital if you want to keep your numbers up.

Just look at the level of traffic each post gets relative to the SEO and figure out which keywords are doing well and which aren’t, and then tailoring future posts to meet those standards. It sounds deceptively simple but trust me it works wonders. So much of SEO is based on trial and error, you have to learn exactly which keywords and what strategy works for you specifically, keep posting, keep tagging and keep watch.

Callum Davies

Callum is a film school graduate who is now making a name for himself as a journalist and content writer. His vices include flat whites and 90s hip-hop. Follow him @CallumAtSMF

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