Writing the Perfect SEO Texts
Search engine optimization is like rowing against the current. If you stop, you fall back. It’s important to stay on top of SEO and follow the latest search engine rules. But what makes a good SEO text, what do Google and Co. prefer? Get answers here.
A good SEO text is all about your user. Although there are still certain rules where you can best place the keyword in the text, the interests of the user and thus the added value of a website have long been the focus of attention. This was recently confirmed by John Müller from Google on his Twitter account.
Basics in SEO Text: The Seven Rules
For your text to rank particularly well, it must please both the search engine and the reader – but this is not witchcraft. With the seven rules of search engine optimization you have a good basis.
Rule 1:
Choose appropriate keywords. Concentrate on a few words or phrases that match your text and under which it should be found. SEO Tools like Keyword Tool or KWFinder are a good help to find the right search terms. They also give you an overview of the different search volumes.
Rule 2:
Place the selected keyword within the H1 (main heading), one of your subheadings (H2 or H3) and a few times in continuous text – at the beginning, at the end and at least once in the middle. Also mention it in the meta title and meta description to appear in your Google snippet. So that title and meta description are displayed completely by Google and not truncated, the number of characters is decisive. Current: Title maximum 70 characters, Meta Description maximum 230 characters (instead of 160 characters as before).
The rule of thumb for the meta-description is: Write one or two short sentences that reflect the content of the page. Put the main keyword at the beginning and ask for a clear action (Call-to-Action). Also pay attention to an appealing choice of words: Arouse the user’s curiosity, offer them added value, tease them! Because the snippet should lure your potential reader to your website. No interest from the user, no click on your site!
Rule 3:
Give your item structure. Use enumerations, intertitles and boldings. Arrange the headings of your SEO text hierarchically (H1, H2, H3, etc.). This allows the user to skim over the content, but still capture the most important information and quickly find his way around.
Rule 4:
Offer your readers added value by adding internal and external links to your text. These lead to articles that are thematically related to yours.
Rule 5:
Enrich your SEO text with images – because not only the user, Google also loves images. You’re adding value to your article. However, make sure that the image files are not too large and thus slow down the loading time of your website, blog or online shop. With tools like TinyPNG you can reduce file size in no time without any quality loss. To do SEO in Hamburg and other big cities, you really need to ensure your site is fast, so don’t skip this part.
Then add a caption, a description, an alt tag and a matching file name to each image in your SEO text – and ideally integrate your keyword into all four.
Rule 6:
Like an inverted pyramid, the most important information is at the beginning of the text. This allows the user to see immediately whether he is interested in your article and continues reading it or leaves it abruptly. If this happens more often, it leads to an increased bounce rate – Google also notices this. While the opinions of SEO experts differ as to whether this will have a negative impact on your ranking, it is certainly not your goal to scare the reader away after just a few seconds – so make sure you get started in an exciting way.
Rule 7:
The last point of the glorious seven refers not only to a single SEO text, but to your entire website – keyword: usability. Ensure a simple, clear and therefore user-friendly menu navigation. Google also prefers a clear structure. Make users and search engine happy and ultimately yourself: as one of the winners in the ranking!
Tell a story with the SEO text
You write for a search engine, but should read your text people. So don’t just tell me the facts. Only an exciting, multi-faceted article captivates the reader and makes him recommend your text to others. It doesn’t matter what you write about: well written, every article finds its fans and one of them is certainly Google!
Current SEO News
1 Google distrusts Symmantec
Google has announced that it will withdraw trust in Symantec’s security certificates and remove them from the Chrome browser step by step. With a market share of approximately 40 percent, Symantec is the largest issuer of security certificates to date, for example for verifying secured SSL connections.
Google now criticizes Symantec for alleged quality defects and will gradually withdraw confidence in the products from March 2018. Users of the popular chrome browser will then no longer be able to access websites with the affected certificates directly. Webmasters are now encouraged to implement an alternative to Symantec certificates as quickly as possible.
2. large SEO potential in B2B
Growth in organic e-commerce is becoming increasingly costly and complex as competition increases. No B2C retailer today can afford to compete without an SEO strategy. Apart from the mass market, however, the B2B sector still holds great potential for agencies and advertisers, which can be activated with comparatively little effort.
At a conference in Portland, SEO veteran Rand Fishkin gave six tips for successful B2B SEO: “Particularly for topics with low search volumes, high visibility can be achieved if content is specifically developed along the purchase decision process characterized less by price than by offer characteristics. This is how brand-driven multiple rankings can be achieved. The use of high-reach portals such as Quora, Slideshare or Linkedin is also a good way to effectively place highly specialized content.
In addition, it is worth addressing industry-specific multipliers, of which there are often only a few, but which have a comparatively high reach in the target group. However, as always with search engine optimization, the most important thing is staying power.
3. Apple’s Siri now loves Google
Anyone who performs a search on their iPhone with Siri will no longer be referred to Microsoft Bing search results as soon as no voice response from the Apple Language Assistant is available. The company from Cupertino, California, justified the change of the iPhone search provider with the standardization of search technologies between its platforms iPhone (Siri), Mac (Spotlight) and the internal search on iOS. The results displayed will include website links and videos, Apple said. Microsoft’s search engine Bing had served as the standard search engine behind Siri since the launch of the iPhone 4s in 2011.
4. Bing: Links still an important ranking factor
In the beginning was the link. With Google, the age of PageRank, the weighting of a website according to number and quality of its link structure, began in 1997. For many years, a good backlink was the gold standard in the SEO business. Unfortunately, the optimization industry is taking advantage of the manipulation potential of this technology, so that from 2012 search engines began to downgrade the rating of links as a ranking factor and replace it with less manipulable measures such as social signals, clickstream data or engagement data.
But the time of backlinks is far from over. Microsoft now confirmed that with its search engine Bing you have not yet reached the point where you can do without backlinks as a ranking factor. Just as with the competition from Google, outbound links with utility from sites with high authority are indispensable, according to Microsoft.