SEO

SEO TIPS FOR PUBWRITERS

There are millions of pages written on the topic of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

This page is my effort to curate the best usable advice I've found (and keep in mind there is no shortage of bad, outdated advice out there as well).

If you are looking for some great tools to save you time, check out this page on AppSumo.

The Basics

  1. How Search Engines Operate
  2. How People Interact With Search Engines
  3. Why Search Engine Marketing is Necessary
  4. The Basics of Search Engine Friendly Design & Development
  5. Keyword Research
  6. How Usability, Experience, & Content Affect Rankings
  7. Growing Popularity and Links
  8. Search Engine’s Tools for Webmasters Intro
  9. Myths & Misconceptions About Search Engines
  10. Measuring and Tracking Success

    Pinging (and why it's important)

  1. Create a sitemap

  2. Ping your site to the search engines

    We can use a script to help us autofill the links you need to click on the submit your sitemap to various indexing engines. Be sure to first verify that the sitemap exists in the location you are pointing to! Example: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=https://billfroehlich.com/sitemap.xml http://blogsearch.google.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.winterlinestories.com/sitemap.xml http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?sitemap=https://billfroehlich.com/sitemap.xml

    Google Ping: http://blogsearch.google.com/ping Yahoo Ping: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit Bing Ping: http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://YOURrssfeedURL.COM Ask Ping: http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.YourWebSite.com/sitemap.xml Weblogs.com ping: http://weblogs.com/ Technorati ping: http://technorati.com/ Bloglines ping: http://www.bloglines.com/ Auto pinging sites that will do the work for you include: Sitemapping.net: http://sitemapping.net/ Pagerank.net: http://www.mypagerank.net/service_pingservice_index https://pingler.com/ https://pingomatic.com/

    More Reading

  1. Select a keyword or key phrase and put it in the title and in the first paragraph. Have the keyword appear a couple more times in the article, such as midway and near the end.
  2. Make your verbs active rather than passive.
  3. Write shorter sentences.
  4. Keep paragraphs short.
  5. Vary your sentence structure and the first word of the sentence. Yoast helps coach you on this, commenting on the variety or lack of it in your “consecutive sentences.”
  6. Insert a header, meaning an H2 (##) in Pubwriter, every 300 words or less.
  7. Use transition words.
  8. Edit and save the “snippet” that Google will pick up about your blog/article. Make the snippet succinct, yet complete.
  9. Choose hashtags & categories for posts in your blog/website structure and assign the post accordingly to its categories.
  10. Find an appropriate image for your post. When you insert it, always use the alt tag. You know you've done this correctly when the image comes over when you post a link to the page on Facebook (or other social media).
  11. Put into each post/article a couple of cross references to related articles on your own blog/website.
  12. Repost your snippets (see # 8 above) on high traffic sites and link back to the original article.

    SEO TOOLS