Hello Steemians!
The goal for this post, and this SEO 101 series generally, is to enable you to take your content to the next level (and Steemit to the SKY!) by giving you the information you need to improve the Search Engine Optimization of your posts. That’s right, websites aren’t the only thing that can benefit from SEO, you can too. The best part is that the better optimized your content is for SEO the more traffic it brings to Steemit.com and the more demand it creates for Steem. So everyone wins!
There are two ways you can optimize your content for search engines. One is organic and another is spammy. So, it's really important to understand the right way to improve your posts and optimize for search engines in an organic and legit way.
Intro to SEO:
There are two main components of SEO:
- On-Page SEO
- Off-Page SEO
While there has been some debate over which is superior, my analysis finds that both are equally important. So today we’re going to start by discussing OnPage SEO.
OnPage SEO consists of four basic elements:
- Including the targeted keyword in the title tag.
- Including the targeted keyword in an h1 tag.
- Including the targeted keyword in the first few lines of the article (description).
- Including the targeted keyword in Meta Tags or Tags.
Sounds easy, right? You pick a keyword and start filling the post with those keywords. Unfortunately, Google has gotten very good at detecting and eliminating this kind of optimization (i.e spammers).
Optimizing the Google-friendly Way:
First you need to find the right keywords. As this is not the main topic of today’s tutorial, I will cover how exactly to do this in the coming days. But in the meantime you can leverage Google Keywords Planner
You'll have to use your Gmail account to login. Once you do, this screen should show up:
Now, click on "Search for new keywords using a phrase". See below:
Suppose that you want to write about "Travel" or "Food", then you'll have to be more specific about which food (food name) or which place (in case of travel), so that you start getting sensible keyword ideas. In my case, I searched for Chicken Biryani:
As you can see, Google suggested 700+ keyword ideas. Now you might wonder why it is that “Chicken Biryani” is listed as “Low Competition” on the competition table. What Google means by "Low" competition is that Advertisers -- those who run PPC campaigns -- are not highly interested in this term. And it shows to Advertisers that they can pay less for a click and run their ads on Google. So, it doesn’t calculate any of the S.E.O difficulty level. In fact, Chicken Biryani is the most difficult phrase to rank for.
This tool is designed for those who want to advertise on Google. That's why it is in the Adwords section. But we can still use this data to our advantage by analyzing the number of searches the phrase get and evaluating the SERP competition to figure out what type of technique it requires to rank! (We’ll cover these factors and techniques in my upcoming posts)
Now that you have a keyword in hand, for example: "Chicken Biryani", you want to use it in your post and optimize it. Here’s how to do that.
Title:
Use the keyword with mixture of relevant words in Title.
Simply giving it a title of 'Chicken Biryani" will look spammy since it's a two word phrase, and a title usually contains 5-6 words.
Superior examples would be: "Learn How To Cook Chicken Biryani" or "Chicken Biryani - One Of The Best Asian Foods?
In the above example, we used two keywords actually:
1- Chicken Biryani
2- Best Asian Food (Unintentionally)
Description:
In Steemit, you don't have a separate Description option, so your first few lines will act as your "Description". I prefer to use my keywords in the second or third line of the description because it looks natural. If you start directly with "Chicken biryani is this and that" it’s more likely that google’s algorithms will register this as spam. But it depends and varies from case to case. If it feels natural to include the keywords earlier, that’s fine.
This also brings up an important point: you don’t have to cater your content to the keywords. You can continue to create the content you’re passionate about and then look for undervalued keywords that you can easily incorporate into your content. This will make the SEO optimization even more powerful because the keywords will interwoven into organically generated content.
Keyword In h1 Tag:
In Steemit, the H1 option is a little tricky. When I first used this tag <h1> and tried to bold it with markdown functions (**), it didn't work. Fortunately, using the bold html tag instead (<b></b>) worked perfectly!
Using your keywords in an H1 tag will help the Search Engines easily find what they are looking for.
Keyword in Meta Tags (or Tags):
Although this technique is a bit out-dated, it doesn't have any negative effect. In fact, it offers a little advantage, so choosing not leverage this technique will result in a lower ranking.
In Steemit, I was unable to find a "Meta Tags" option but I found a "Tags" option when I wrote the first ever SEO optimized article on steemit.com. Since a space in the “Tags” field of steemit separates one tag from another if you have a keyword which is two or more words long, then you should use a dash (-) instead of a space.
For example, if your post was about Chicken Biryani recipe you would write it as "Chicken-Biryani-Recipe" in tags
Avoid The Spammy Way:
You shouldn't mention the keywords so often that they start to look spam. Although there are no hard rules about what is “too” much, if your article is 800 words long, then you should mention your main keyword no more than 8 times. 1st in title, 2nd in description, 3rd in h1, and 4th in tags and then another 4 times organically within the body of the text.
If you mention your keyword dozens of time in a 500 words article, you'll shortly see Google kicking you out of the search engine, and with Steemit, you should never take this risk.
Important Info:
There are other important factors for On-Page SEO which I will take on in a future post. We'll also discuss effective keyword research and analysis methods, and other important factors. The keyword technique demonstrated in this article is very basic. This S.E.O tutorial series is aimed to educate steemit members to help them grow their reach as well as help Steemit grow. If you found this post valuable please show your vote-love and follow so that you can help make this SEO tutorial series a success and benefit from all the valuable tutorials coming in the future.
I had not even thought about SEO optimization for the platform. 🤓
Mind opening and helpful for sure! I'll be tinkering with the option.
Thank you. 👍
Thank you. Much appreciated!
Me either. Looking forward to the rest of the series
Thanks that is agreat tutorial. I heard from my friend that you can basically sell everything if you master seo. Is that true, can you offer a tutorial on how to set up a online business with seo ans demonstration? Thank you
Hi @wilkinshui
Thanks for the compliment.
Basically, you get visitors to your sale page with the help of S.E.O and it increases the chances of sales but you have to be expert and honest in order to earn from selling stuff. If you have marketing skills + S.E.O and looking to sell something genuine, then you can make load of money with that.
Sure, I'll be posting more tutorials in detail. Follow me for updates! :)
Thank you
This is an excellent article for many I would have to assume and a great way to get a load of them to use proper tagging for maximum return. Awesome work, thanks for sharing!
Namaste :)
P.S.: I simply LOVE rice biryani!!!
Thanks for liking as well as supporting this SEO Tutorial Series! Stay tuned for the next post
And yes, Biryani is one of my favorite food! :)
Congrats you have been selected as Author of the day by the Steemvoter (SV) Guild, keep up the good work and helping make Steem great!
Note: You should receive many guild votes in an hour or so, enjoy!
That's amazing. I really appreciate your generous service and also the nomination by @steemist . Thanks a lot!
I totally hadn't made the connection of SEO to this Steemit platform! Awesome content!! I learned a handful about SEO for my personal website at my university, and am so excited to see that a lot of the same principles can be applied to my Steemit posts as well! Look forward to continuing to read your SEO series :) Thank you!
You diccuss it in detail. thank you
Hello @princewahaj take a look at the blog post where I talk about your article
https://steemit.com/steemit/@felipesuarez/steemit-seo-friendly-url
Its a tip about SEO friendly URLs for Steemit blogs
Great work! This should be very helpful to people.
Thanks for your appreciation and support. Yup, if all people start to optimize the content well, we will see much improvements! :thumbsup:
As others have said, I too hadn't thought of using SEO with Steemit. What an oversight! Thank you for providing this valuable information, particularly separating the spammy from organic | Wheat from the chaff.
I'm new to steemit, maybe am yet to see other great post from great minds like this one, but till then; this is one of the best posts so far with lots of useful information. I didn't just read and comment, I've archived it in my mind for my own improvement and growth in steemit. Thanks so much for this article @princewahaj. I've followed you already. STEEMIT! ONE LOVE.
First of all, Welcome to Steemit!
Thank you for the compliment. I appreciate it a lot.
I hadn't even thought about SEO optimization on here. Thanks for the reminder! :)
You're welcome. Start following what is mentioned in this post and follow me for more updates. Let's make Steemit successful in eyes of search engines together!
what is h1 ? I din't understand what is it and how to use that, can you explain more please ?
Can a nonmember who finds your steemit content through google upvote? @ironshield
Great post ! :) Upvoted and Followed. Thanks for sharing.
Amazing ,thank you for sharing.
Interesting read. Thanks for sharing!
Very useful, thank you so much :)
Interesting enough!... Does this helps to get more steemit views?
Thank you for this post
Very informative. You are not only helping making the site more Search Engine-friendly, but also contributing to the improvement of systematization of every single article created on this page (by those who will read you of course :D). Up vote, Resteem, Follow. Not often I do that :).
Pretty cool stuff! Im a SEO consultant myself... Did not think about optimizing the content in STEEMIT...great post! :)
Really awesome article. Your discussion on headings and keywords was extremely insightful and helpful. Rock on!
thank you
Hello @princewahaj ! I'll share/resteem all your posts if you can follow me and resteem too my future posts ,you're the best ,thank you and hope we'll help each other
I wish you have the best posts !
Thanks ill take note of this. Im new here.
Ah !! Finally after so many researching on the net i have finally found a good one. SEO were always confusing for me..this post helped me understand it much better. Thanks @princewahaj
That's an interesting article and very helpful for those who have a traditional SEO experience. But, I am curious to know what is the role of back linking as part of the SEO process, or maybe that's a past thing that should be skipped here.
@princewahaj thanks for good tut - what html editor are you using? just the one on steemit?
Following and commenting on many new posts are key activities that I am doing before writing another post. It is all about boosting my pay for a post. YOu advocated it to be normal to enrich posts with keywords. I will do that.
Thank you. It's helpful.
Verry useful, especially for a novice in Steem like me.
This is great stuff! I somehow didn't think SEO mattered so much on promoting steemit contents. Thanks for sharing! super helpful for a noob like me
Cool! Thanks. Looking forward to the series.
Excellent post!
I will try to incorporate these SEO methods into my coming posts. Hopefully it can help both me and the community to be found and to grow.
Thanks to both @princewahaj for this informative post and to @donkeypong for leading me here to read it.
@zebbad
I'm a bit confused, since Im new to Steemit, but if I upvote this post of yours, does it still receive any reward or not? Im asking this because a user can create a piece of content that keeps bringing in new people to Steemit from google search. It can create an ongoing value and the higher the incoming traffic is, the more value was created. I think this is something that needs to be addressed in the way rewards are allocated on Steemit. Either by a systemic change or by the bots that are interested in the long term prospering of Steemit.
wow! Thank you! This is very helpful! @dobsdies I think this would be a great read for you too
Thank you so much for making this series. I will try me best to memorize your teachings and incorporate them to my future posts. Really interesting stuff!
very good points especially specific to steemit platform. I used to optimize seo for websites but this is a new page for me for steemit. Thank you
Very interesting, thank you for sharing. I look forward to your other articles on the subject.
as a newbie here in steemit, this article is a must read, i will follow you @princewahaj and read all your blog. I'm very thankful that there is people like you who are willing to help people. keep it up man
Amazing. Glad I found it. What is h1 tag though?
Cool！ It's kind of cheating！
Wow, thank you that was just what I was looking for. I joined steemit a few months back and I was alsways wondering about doing a little seo into it.
Thank you so much for this post!!
I'm starting in steemit and it has been very helpful.
Can you rank my content on Google's first page, please?
Saya suka artikel anda
Do i need to build backlinks to my steemit posts to boost ranking as it is done for websites?
Not necessary but can be helpful when you want to take it to the next level
Is steemit good to rank natural in google search results?