The ultimate guide to online content – part one
Moz offers 10 chapters on SEO from how search engines work, to the best tools to use and how to measure and track success.
Here’s how they explain what SEO actually is:
“SEO is the practice of improving and promoting a web site in order to increase the number of visitors the site receives from search engines. There are many aspects to SEO, from the words on your page to the way other sites link to you on the web.
Sometimes SEO is simply a matter of making sure your site is structured in a way that search engines understand. Search Engine Optimization isn’t just about ‘engines’. It’s about making your site better for people too.”
Read the introduction to this guide before continuing here. Without this basic foundation, what we’re going to explore next won’t make much sense!
I’d also highly recommend you read chapters 1-3 for some more in-depth (but understandable and accessible) background on how search engines work, how people use them, and why we need to use SEO. Again, without this understanding you might find this hard to follow…
Why do we need it?
Moz puts this well in chapter 3 of their guide:
“You can build a perfect website, but its content can remain invisible to search engines unless you promote it. This is due to the nature of search technology, which relies on the metrics of relevance and importance to display results.”
They use the ‘tree falls in a forest’ adage to explain that it’s all well and good to post content, but if no one is around to hear the sound (or see the article), it may not exist at all. The same goes for online content: if we don’t try to spread it, it might as well not exist.
Do I have to sacrifice the quality of my writing?
The short answer is no, of course not! We’re an online magazine after all, which means we publish high quality content. So, we’re not looking to publish articles jam-packed with keywords that read like bland advertorials. We want to give you the tips and tricks, so that the process is interesting (we want you to learn something useful!) but also feels natural.
Is it hard to master? Shouldn’t I leave it to the professionals?
As we’ve discovered through our many hours (what feels like yeeeears) of research into SEO is that it’s much easier to master this than you might think. None of our editorial team had any experience with this before we started. Many of us aren’t particularly technologically minded. But we’ve all discovered that secretly, we’re a little bit nerdy. And we’re completely obsessed with SEO. So you’re talking to the right people… If we can do, we believe you can too!
We want to share what we’ve learnt with you, to save you the time and frustration it took us to get to the bottom of it! (Not every IT geek out there writes clearly or uses plain English, apparently.)
So, next we’ll look at the things that actually determine how well your website ranks in search engines.
