What is SEO, really? It stands for search engine optimization, which is a set of practices designed to improve the appearance and positioning of web pages in organic search results.
Search engines like Google and Bing use programs called ‘crawlers’ (sometimes even called bots or spiders), to collect information on all the content they can locate on the internet. These crawlers would start at a well-known online page, and then they follow (crawl) its internal and external links to other sites’ pages.
As they crawl, they can grasp what each website is about and how it’s connected to all of the other pages in the search engine’s enormous database. So, when a user searches for something, the search engine employs sophisticated algorithms to provide what it considers to be the most accurate and relevant set of results for that query.
In simple words, every time you Google something, there are lots of little bots crawling all over the Internet, to find the most accurate thing for you. And SEO is basically employing techniques that make these bots easier to find you.
Technically, SEO have one and only one purpose only: to rank as high as possible in the search results. Logically, that is the reasons why everyone is talking about SEO these days. I mean, who doesn’t want to be the first thing to be found on Google?
But why is it especially important for writers, to get their work out there?
There are three reasons why.
Most people would never click on the second page of search results.
Even thinking about battling for the first place on the Google search results can be daunting. And you might comfort yourself that ranking is not everything. But take note that 75% of Internet users never scroll past the first page of search results. So you need to shoot your shot.
And it is not as hard as you think it would be. Because it is less about creating a masterpiece content, and more about helping the bots (which will help people) to find your already existing content that will actually be shared by them. I mean, what’s the point of a masterpiece if people cannot see it?
You just need to tweak some stuff. A high search score can be influenced by a variety of factors, including the content of an article and the frequency with which specific keywords are used. There’s also the quantity, size, and quality of images on the page, the length and structure of the title, and the meta description; a short phrase that appears in search results and describes what the article or web page is about. Done correctly, your content can rise in the ranks.
SEO increases social validation on your content.
Traffic is driven by content. It’s no secret that that content has the power to attract visitors to your website. But you cannot just throw clickbait titles all over your website. SEO considers not just the quantity, but the quality of the visitors as well. An optimized content would be structured in a logical, user-friendly manner, with relevant internal and external links embedded into it. (Now you see why I have so many links on my articles?)
When people find, and like your content, they will share it. Even if it started with just one person, that one person may attract 10 more people to your content. Then they themselves may attract 10 people each to your content. As the views steadily increases, more people would be interested in your content, as they see there are a lot of other people being interested in that content before them.
SEO spreads our messages to as many people as possible.
The previous two reasons are the marketing reasons. Get ranked higher, get higher traffic, which will make the website revenue higher. Or more traffic equals more exposure, which equals more people hiring you for writing services. We get that.
With that being said, let’s all come back to why we are writers in the first place; to spread messages. If we really believe in the messages in our writing, surely, we want to spread it to as many people as possible. We will put our best efforts so that we reach the greatest number of people possible, to read what we write, to solve their problem, and to help them.
Therefore, if you ever run out of motivation when learning about the technicalities and the complexities of SEO, be motivated that apart from the marketing side, you are helping people by making them easier to discover your writing as well.
So there you have it, three reasons on why you as a writer should embed SEO in your writing to get your work out there. Unlike before where SEO was treated as an entity of its own, now it is a part of a complete content marketing strategy. Go ahead and start learning about SEO now, to get yourself on page 1 of Google search results.
All the best!