TLDR: scroll to the end of the post.

If you write a blog and you want it to be discoverable on search engines you have to work through what is called search engine optimization.

Doing a good SEO consists of a set of techniques, tricks, tools, principles that you can follow to be good at it.

I will try to enlist everything I know about SEO and update this article with all I learn about SEO under the sun that is meaningful.

SEO has majorly two parts. Objective and subjective. Objective things are where you know what to do and mostly how to do as well. Subjective things are when you are not certain about what to do and how to do. I will mention objective things with more detail than subjective things.

Subjective SEO techniques

Here I share about SEO strategies for which no trick, rules or cookie cutter exists.

Content is king

It's an old saying, "content is king" and it's still true. If you write helpful and valuable content you are optimizing for search engines automatically.

Produce above average content for above average results. Produce mind blowing content for mind blowing results.

Your success will, of course, be limited by the number of people who are searching for what you write about. I still believe, given 8 billion people in the word, do not chase what writing has good market. Write where you can add value and you are knowledgable at and you will have an audience. In fact, it's easier to rank while writing for small community than addressing the entire world at once. This advice only holds true for non-fiction. For fiction, you have to go to marketplaces and have a go to market strategy for that. Usually no one is searching for your exact story on Google. For fictional writing, there are still objective SEO things that can help you rank.

Here is what Google thinks what makes content good. You don't have to follow all of that advice all at once but keep it as guiding principle only.

Satisfying user's search intent

Your titles, description, and content should satisfy users intent. That means

• It needs to have keywords that some one would search for so Google shows your page in the results.
• The title & description should be catch and satisfying enough that user clicks on it.
• Your page should have higher authority in eyes of Google than your competition to climb to the first page.

When you are starting, it's easier to target long tail keywords instead of short tail keywords.

Long tail vs short tail keywords

Long tail keywords are the ones which are typically more specific and have less volume/traffic. Short tails are opposite.

Some examples of short tail:

• personal growth
• motivations
• habits
• how to build habits

Some examples of long tail:

• personal growth techniques for middle aged women
• motivational quotes for rugby players
• how to build a habit to play piano with few minutes everyday

Now it's quite obvious that the long tails will have less traffic than the short tails. If you are not a mega content corporate, I would always recommend writing for long tails.

• Long tail keywords are easier to rank. Almost all short tail keywords are satisfied by big publishers. In long tail, with some change in keywords and niche you can meet your users intent and get ranked.
• Long tail keywords sell better. If you sell something, it's usually easier to sell by focusing on long tail keywords. If you have a course that targets personal growth of middle aged women, it is inherently an easy sell as compared to a generic personal growth course. Your course will resonate better with a target audience. Your course will have less competition.
• Long tail keywords generate more ideas. Generating more content with long tails is easy. There are very limited number of short tail keywords in a specific niche. Long tail is where the content lies.
• Having many good long tail pages can slowly qualify you for short tailed ones. Once you build authority in specific keyword and your content constantly satisfies users intent you can slowly target short tail ones and Google will respect that.
• Long tail keywords can be programatically generated. This is mostly true for data driven websites. Classified ads is a prime example. If your website lists cars and you have enough data you could generate very specific keywords that match user's intent. Instead of targeting "cars for sale", you could target "Audi 2019 for sale in Beaverton Oregon". Similarly, based on data, you could generate many pages on all the filters you have that are typically searched by user. Most blog writers don't benefit from programatically generated pages though.

Short tail and long tails are relative concept. A short tail in a very competitive niche could be quite long and you will need to find longer long tails in competitive niche.

For example, "how to build habits for teenagers" is probably still a short tail keyword while "ventriloquism tutorial" might still be easier to rank because the nature of content. Habits is a problem of 8 billion people. Ventriloquism, not so much. So in very competitive niche, you have to get very specific.

Quality trumps quantity

10 high quality pages can trump 100 mass produced/AI generated pages. Google released a helpful content update. It says, if you have a lot of unhelpful/low quality content then Google will penalize you for having that. Which means even if you have 10 solid pages of content and 90 random regurgitated articles, your 10 good pages will suffer because of the rest of the content. LLMs and AI is all the rage now but understand that anything generated by AI is average of all the content on internet. Producing content through AI is a highway to mediocrity. Also, current AI can't say anything meaningful that's not said already. You can use AI to refine, tweak, spell check content but generating entire pieces through AI will not help. I've seen blogs first hand with thousands of pages with plausible content but they didn't amount to much rank on Google.

Objective SEO techniques

Here I share about SEO strategies that can be achieved and measured with certainty.

Page speed and user experience

Your page should load fast. It should have good user experience and shouldn't have glitches, annoying popups, and jumbled layout. If you have a website, you can go to PageSpeed insights, enter your page URL and see how it performs on this metrics. It also includes what you can do to make it better. Most of those results are technical and can only be understood by the person who programmed your blog. PageSpeed insights is a tool provided by Google and it matters.

SEO optimized HTML tags

Each page should have following tags that are written with user's search intent in mind. Search intent means what would a user potentially search for to discover what you've written.

Title

A well written title that satisfies user's search intent is important. Random or mysterious title that are very different than the content doesn't help a blog post much in terms of SEO.

Google talks about how to write good titles.

Title tag looks like this in HTML and it is nested under head tag.

<title>Comprehensive guide to SEO for blog writers</title>

It is also important to use OpenGraph meta tags because some websites use that too. It looks like this in HTML and also nested under head tag.

<meta property="og:title" content="Comprehensive guide to SEO for blog writers" />

Description

Just like title, description is slightly elaborate explanation of what the blog post is about. It should also be written with user's search intent in mind and ideally should have keywords that user will search for.

Description tag looks like following in HTML and it is nested under head tag.

<meta name="description" content="All you need to know about SEO as a blog writer in one detailed explanation. Good for beginners and experts alike">

Here is what Google thinks makes a good description.

It is also important to use OpenGraph meta tag for description because some websites use that. Just like title tag, it goes under head tag in HTML. Here is how it looks like.

<meta property="og:description" content="All you need to know about SEO as a blog writer in one detailed explanation. Good for beginners and experts alike" />

Image

While image tag doesn't contribute much to SEO of a page it really helps when a link is shared on different websites like X, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.

Image tag appears under head tag. Here is how it looks like.

<meta property="og:image" content="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1600716051809-e997e11a5d52" />

Page previews

All above tags also help in click through rates as your page is shows up on different websites like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, X, etc. For example, see following image where you can see title, description, and image being shown

Self-referential canonical tag

When different websites link to your website, sometimes they add a referrer e.g. when Product Hunt refers to your website, it does https://lykhari.com?ref=producthunt. When search engines see such link they consider it a unique URL. Most often then not it's same as https://lykhari.com but Google doesn't know. Which makes it a duplicate content issue. i.e. two different URL load the same piece of content. Google doesn't index duplicate content and will only index one site and it will show up as warnings in Google Search Console. It is not an issue in itself but can cause a lot warnings/noise and keep you from focusing on actual issues. To avoid it you do one of two things.

• Either redirect all query parameters (ref is a query parameter) pages to home page with a 301
• Use canonical link.

Canonicals can be set in three ways

• HTTP header sends the canonical in response.
• Sitemap contains canonical for each URL.
• HTML markup contains canonical tag.

A self-referential canonical tag looks like following

<link rel="canonical" href="https://lykhari.com">

Where href points to the base URL with no query parameters and it needs to be added to all pages. Canonicals can be set in three ways

Robots.txt

When a search engines decides to crawl your website they start with a /robots.txt file. Robots.txt file contains following information

• What pages should be parsed
• What pages shouldn't be parsed
• What devices can parse it
• How often it should be parsed
• Link to Sitemap

Robots.txt syntax and file format can be found here. The file should sit at root of your domain. e.g. https://lykhari.com/robots.txt

Most search engines respect contents of robots.txt file. However, crawlers may or may not respect it.

Sitemap

Sitemap is a file that contains pages structure of your website. Your website may have zero, one or many sitemaps. Sitemaps help search engine identify all available pages on a website. Ideally you shouldn't have orphaned pages but if you do, sitemap is the only way to help search engines discover them. Orphaned page is a page on your website, which is not linked through any other page on your website.

Most common way of maintaining sitemap is by keeping a sitemap.xml file at the root of your domain.

Here is a small example of sitemap that links to two pages.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <url>
      <loc>http://lykhari.com</loc>
   </url>
   <url>
      <loc>http://lykhari.com/i/features</loc>
   </url>
</urlset> 

Complete sitemap.xml's syntax can be found here and this links tells what Google considers and ignores in a sitemap. A sitemap should not be bigger than 50MB (uncompressed) or have more than 50000 URLs. In such a case you need to break your sitemap into multiple files.

Links

Linking is important SEO factor. There are three ways we need to worry about links

Backlinks

Backlinks are other webpages that link to your page. More backlinks from trusted sources earns you trust in Google's eyes. The only relevant way to get more backlinks is to produce quality content that people like to share with others.

When writing content, solve your customers problem but also solve in a way that your content ends up being linkable. Some examples of highly linked content

• Free tools.
• Ultimate & comprehensive guides to some topic like this one.
• Facts and data dense content.
• Exhaustive lists related to some topic.

Write good content and do not buy links ever. Do not trade links. It doesn't help anyone.

Internal Linking

Internal linking is one of your website's page linking to other pages. Internal link decreases bounce rate. Bounce rate is when someone opens your page from Google and then goes back to Google again. Google uses this as an indicator of whether your page solved visitor's problem or not. Not an ideal measure but it is what is is.

Internal link also help pass some page authority to other pages. If a page has tonne of backlinks from external sources, you can use that page to link to other relevant pages to pass on some trustworthiness.

Internal link help people find relevant content.

Search engines crawl page and all the links that originate from that page. This is especially important if you don't have a well maintained sitemap.

Page Structure

A page should follow a good semantic HTML structure. If a webpage has header, article, and a footer, all those elements should reside in header, main, and footer tags. Navigation should reside in header tag. Use article tag where necessary.

A page should have headings as h1, h2, h3, etc and each heading should be followed by a paragraph p.

Here is a good guide about semantic markup.

URL Structure

URL should be simple and ideally have keywords in it.

Schema Markup

Schema markup or structured data markup helps search engines parse your content in a specific way. For example, when you search for a recipe on Google, there's a specific way about how Google shows recipes. Similarly, for shopping list items, blog articles, events and some other things Google has a specific way of showing those results.

For blog writers, it's only important to know about article schema. This guide shows how Google understands structured data and how to configure it.

This is a lot.

I know. If you are pulling your hair out, hear me out. There is a lot to SEO and to be honest most people can't set it correctly. If you are a writer and want to publish your content online, you don't have to worry about all of these things. https://lykhari.com takes care of all the technical/objective SEO headache for you, for free, so you focus on what matters and that is writing.