SEO has some aspects to it that may leave a bad taste in your mouth, but I assure you this is not the case. You may think of those Buzzfeed clickbait-y titles with crappy content. Don't worry, that is not SEO; in fact all of my articles use SEO to some degree.
SEO is an acronym for "Search Engine Optimization" and consists of tactics to help get our content into the search results for the correct terms people search for. We all need to keep SEO in mind when we write our content.
The more of us that show up on the first page of each search engine, the more exposure and potential users Steemit can gain. We all know this is good for us as a community. Most of us even talk about Steemit to our friends and family. Having valuable, evergreen content show up in a search engine not only puts us, but Steemit, in a great light.
Without growth for Steemit, our ecosystem may decay from within. New users bring new ideas, new opinions, and new friends to network with. This also paves the way for new investors to learn about STEEM and SBD. That, in turn, can drive up the price of Steem, making all our hard work pay off monetarily.
That is enough as the short explanation as to why SEO is important to STEEM as a whole. It is now our job to use this tactic when writing our content. Creative writing can benefit from this as well. Some tips help more than others, but if we use the following where we can, our stories and poems have a better chance of exposure.
SEO Tactics For Steem
Keywords
Keywords are the foundation of good SEO. Your keyword is the topic at hand. If the post is about Bitcoin Cash then those two words make up your keyword. Finding your keyword is easy to do and we all know what it is before we even start to write. But, we can get more granular with a little effort.
Let's take the example "Bitcoin Cash" as our topic. We know that this keyword is very competitive and we'd like to increase our chances of exposure within the search engine. The best way to do so is to narrow down the topic. So we look up "Why Bitcoin Cash Is Different From Bitcoin?"
In our search we find that our new, narrowed down keyword (phrase) returns no webpages with that exact phrase! Dang, that is a ton better than if we only used "Bitcoin Cash" as our keyword. That simpler keyword returns seven million webpages containing "Bitcoin Cash."
So the next step is to write the post using our nice, long-tail keyphrase that we know people are searching for. If we want to be extra sure that our phrase is receiving searches, there are many tools online to do so. Start with the title. We need to make sure that our keyphrase gets the level one header.
Don't use another level one header anywhere in your post as it may confuse the search engines. It is a good idea to use the keyphrase as a level two header somewhere in our post as well. One way we can do this is to make the first part an introduction or history of Bitcoin Cash. Then use the level two header with our keyphrase when we start to explain the differences.
The issue with this long keyword is that using it too often will make our post sound awkward. It is always better to sound natural than it is to "keyword stuff." Keyword stuffing is frowned upon and may get our post kicked off the search engine.
Pictures
Photos are a great place to put your keywords and are almost always overlooked. Before uploading an image to Steemit, it is good practice to always change the name of that image. When doing so, use the keyword or phrase in the name. This allows us to pump up the number of times our keyword is on the page without coming off as spammy and awkward.
In our example above, we can use that exact phrase as the image name once or twice depending on how long our post becomes. Many people replace the spaces with a - (dash) when naming the images. This helps the search engine know where a word starts and stops.
This does not only help to raise the keyword percentage in our post, but also may place us into the image searches. Most search engines today have an image search option. When we search for a topic we get the images that contain that word or words in the title.
When we properly add our keywords to the images we use, our chance of exposure does not only go up in relation to the post itself, but also adds another search vector. There have been many times when I visited a site to see the content just from looking for an image and something caught my eye.
These are the two easiest forms of SEO to help increase the eyes that get to our page. It is much easier on Steemit than on our own site. We don't have to worry about domain name purchase lengths, domain and page authority, or adding our sites and pages to each search engine for faster turnaround.
I've done it all over the past fourteen years of blogging. It gets mentally exhausting and may be the biggest reason people quit blogging after only a short while. They write for a month, don't see any traffic coming in, only to find out that there is a library's worth of SEO knowledge they need to learn. It's too much and they drop off.
Luckily for us, Steemit takes care of a ton of SEO for us. All we need to focus on is creating the best content we can, mixed with some "on-page SEO." It's a great ecosystem we have here, Steem helps us earn crypto-currency and we can in turn help Steem grow.
Thanks For Reading!
If you have a topic that you would like me to cover and share what I learned over the last ten years of blogging please let me know!
Other Posts In The Series:
How To Stay Motivated As A New Blogger
Simple Networking Skills To Unlock Success
How To Nurture Emerging Community Engagement
How To Breakthrough Mental Blocks Into Flow
Keep Them Pining: Generating Evergreen Content