No matter how interesting or well-written your content is, if no one can find it, it doesn’t matter. On-page SEO is an SEO element that writers and content creators have the most control over.
In this episode, Tara discusses;
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Name: Tara Struyk
What Tara Does: VP of Content at Janalta
Company: Janalta
Noteworthy: Tara is a writer and editor with several years of experience in online media. She specializes in writing about personal finance, real estate, and health and wellness.
Connect with Tara;
💡Understanding the Essence of SEO
Tara explains the importance of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for content creators, highlighting that on-page SEO is the most controllable element for writers and editors. She explains that SEO involves optimizing a website to enhance its visibility on search engines like Google.
💡Types of SEO: On Page, Off Page, and Technical
Tara categorizes SEO into three types: on-page, off-page, and technical. While briefly touching on technical SEO (related to behind-the-scenes website elements), she delves into off-page SEO, which involves activities like link building and social media engagement to enhance a website’s search performance.
💡Strategies for Effective Off-Page SEO
Tara provides insights into off-page SEO strategies that writers can leverage, such as featuring influencers, cultivating a social media following, and engaging in collaborations with other content creators. She emphasizes the impact of creating outstanding, shareable content to enhance off-page SEO.
💡On-Page SEO Elements
Tara’s insights revolve around on-page SEO, where she details key elements like keyword research, placement, and quality content. She emphasizes the writer’s role in creating content that meets readers’ needs, showcases expertise, and builds trust, aligning with Google’s criteria of expertise, authority, trustworthiness, and experience (EEAT).
Tara explores various aspects of on-page SEO, including keyword placement in the first 100 words, title tags, headings, meta descriptions, and image optimization through alt text and file names. She concludes by highlighting the significance of providing a high-quality user experience through well-crafted content.
Tara Struyk 0:03
Just because on page SEO is really the element that you as writers, and as even, you know, editors content marketers, people in the content space, have the most control over. So that’s the one that you really need to know, the other types, maybe you want to kind of geek out on them at some point. But really, for the most part, you just kind of need to be aware. And you don’t necessarily need to, you know, really understand. So we’ll kind of launch into this year.
So we’ll kind of start at the top, most of you probably already know this, but SEO, search engine optimization. And we’ll kind of focus in on on different types here. But basically, that is the process of optimising a website to improve its visibility on Google for the purposes of improving its search ranking. So what that means is, you know, if you’re writing content that no one reads, it isn’t helping promote a business, it isn’t helping sell a product, it isn’t building an audience.
It’s not doing anything, because no one sees it. So the first thing that you have to think about in creating content, and the thing that you really need to be aware of, is how you can ensure that people are reading it. And that’s where on page SEO, or all types of SEO are helpful. So there are three kinds, or three types or three elements of SEO, they are on page, off page, and technical. And we’ll touch on all three of these so that you’re aware of them and what they mean. But we’re going to focus on on page, again, because that’s the the element that you are going to have the most control over and that you really need to be more of an expert in. So we’ll kind of touch on these other types, first off page and technical.
And then we’ll kind of spend most of the most of the time on on page where we’ll dig in a little deeper. So technical is, is the technical aspects of a site that can help a search engine crawl, read and understand what’s on a page. This is the one that you’re probably going to be least involved with, with if you’re involved at all. But it takes a lot of elements for a page to rank for a certain query. And if Google can’t crawl that page, if you can’t read that page, if it can’t understand what’s on it, it won’t rank. So technical SEO deals with a lot of elements on a website that you can’t see. That’s why it’s called technical, it’s kind of behind the scenes that can affect this process.
And I kind of listed out some of the things, these aren’t everything. But there’s kind of three pillars and technical SEO, things that help you rank things that prevent you from ranking things that contribute to a good website, or user experience. So these are kind of the core elements that people on the technical SEO side are working on. Some of the things that you see in in things that help you rank like whether or not the crawler can crawl whether or not the page can be indexed, if it can’t be indexed to can’t be ranked how well the pages are interlinked with each other because that helps people navigate the site. It helps Google crawler navigate the site, right, it follows links, kind of like a person would.
Things that can prevent you from ranking, redirects, again, index and crawl settings, and then how Google kind of tries to assess the user experience of the page. So how it responds to you how quickly it responds to users, no one likes when you click on a site, and it’s and it takes forever to load, or you can’t click something for several seconds, all those things are things that need to be taken care of on the technical side. And that can influence ranking because again, if people can’t use the page, if they can’t read the page, if it’s not easy to use, then it’s Google doesn’t consider it as good of a resource. So again, less likely that this is a part of content you would be involved in.
But it’s something to know about. And it’s also important to know the technical SEO, it kind of becomes more important in SEO as the site gets bigger. So when you’re kind of dealing with your own blog, it’s probably not going to be something you have to worry about too much like WordPress and a lot of these content management systems that people use personally take care of a lot of this for you. And when you think of things like you know, pages that are broken fluorophores if you have a site with 15 pages, that’s going to be pretty easy for you to fix. It becomes more of a technical challenge if you have a site with 10s of 1000s of pages and there are a bunch of fluorophores Rate tracking down what’s causing that? What’s the best way to fix it. That’s where things get really complicated. So just something to be aware of. Okay, the next one, off page SEO, SEO.
So these are the things like it sounds that are done off a website to contribute to that website’s search performance. So some of these things are link building, social media, increasing engagement and shares. So that could be PR campaigns, events, email outreach. I mean, this is not a comprehensive list. There’s a lot of interesting case studies around off page SEO, and it’s really only limited by people’s creativity. So what you’re trying to do here is say, hey, Google, there’s something special about this page. A lot of people are visiting this page, it’s driving traffic, people are sharing it on social media. It just helps Google kind of see this page, great backlinks as a page that has something better than its competitors. And that’s one that you actually, as a writer have some control over. It’s been a while since we looked at this article that Chima wrote it was one of the first classes.
But I’m consider going back and reading it again and think about it in terms of off page SEO, because she uses some really strong tactics here that that a writer can leverage. So for example, it’s a huge article, filled with unique and valuable insights from experts, that’s more likely to attract backlinks and shares, then something more generic, right? I mean, when you share something, that’s an effort, it takes effort to take that link, put it in your social media, put it in an email, send it to someone else, and you usually only do it because that piece of content is just way over the top outstanding. So getting that nailing that piece and making sure that it’s considerably better than other things like it is, you know, as part of, of getting the job done. It also cites a huge number of influencers with large social followings.
This is something that I’ve leveraged myself quite a bit, but you can almost guarantee that these people will share an article that promotes them in a positive light, you know, she says, hey, this person does an amazing job marketing themselves on LinkedIn, this person, you know, use this specific technique. They’re they, you know, they they’re really standout, that person is probably going to take that, take that article and post it on their own LinkedIn or Twitter, whatever and say, Hey, I was, you know, featured in this, in this article, that’s more links pointing back to that page, it’s more people seeing that page. So that’s actually a component of, of off page SEO.
And then she also leverages available data to make her piece, a good hub of information for searchers. So again, just creating that really high quality, you know, find everything you need kind of resource for that topic that helps generate those backlinks. And I think finally, too, I mean, she’s got a really cultivated a really good social media following with other kind of like minded people, content marketers who will share her content. That’s something that you can’t really do over the course of one article, but it’s certainly an aspect that you can cultivate over time.
Then I have a few other a few kind of on page. Just meeting some people from the waiting room here. A few other off page SEO tips. So you can interview and site influencers, develop a social media presence, build a network with other people in your niche to share your work. So you sometimes see, especially bloggers in certain niches, kind of sharing each other’s work as a way to, you know, build each other’s followings and help each other. And then consider events or creative ways to draw people to a page and get them coming back. So as the writer, you may not have control over that. But on your own site, you might or you might be in a position where you can do that.
Tara Struyk 9:18
I had one site that I’ve worked on where we did a number of events around a page that had lost a lot of its a lot of positions in search. We did email campaigns directed that page. We even did a scavenger hunt around that page that directed people back to it everyday for clues. And over the course of you know, several weeks in some of these campaigns, we actually move this page from page 5050 Plus in search results to page one. So those are just creative things and what’s actually going to work. It’s going to depend on the site and the topic that you are working on. But it’s worth considering and it’s kind of a fun thing to do. To leverage just getting that creativity going and, and thinking of ways to drive more traffic to your content.
So next up on page SEO, so this is kind of the meat of this week, this is where we’re really going to dive in more in detail. And I sent you a pretty good guide around this to read through, this is the SEO that you really need to understand when you build your brief and create your content. And when you kind of go through this, you can see why the brief or any brief you know, you can you can use content harmony, you can use market muse, thank you, you have access to content harmony, it’s building around these key things like what are the keywords, where they appear, it’s kind of directing you to these on page elements and making sure they’re in place.
So it’s really helpful to understand those when you build your brief whether you do it all by yourself, like we’ve learned or you use some kind of software to help you. You kind of need to understand what that what that programme is trying to do and try to help you do what faster, basically faster better. So on page SEO is the efforts you’re making directly on a page to optimise that page. And a lot of this is in the writing, which we’re which is why we’re going to focus on it, talk about it here. But you know, these are the things that happen on the page. And for the most part, these are things that you yourself can see, you know, you don’t need to be looking at code or anything like that, I mean, these are visible. So this is not every single thing and on page SEO, but these are the ones that you need to really understand and, and that you will be, you know, responsible for and a lot of cases as a writer, and certainly a few work on your own blogs that you should really understand well, the ones that you probably have less control over in the list here are probably URL.
And maybe some of the things around images, which we’ll talk about briefly. But it’s it’s still good to understand. So we’ll we’ll touch on the ones that are most important, we’ll dig into the ones that are most important and touch on the ones that are less so. So the first one is keyword research, we’ve spent quite a bit of time here already. And that’s what you’re really doing when you create your brief. If your writing does not have an audience, you’re spending time and possibly somebody else’s money on something that people aren’t going to read. So it doesn’t really serve anyone, it’s not helping your career. It’s not helping. It’s not helping whoever you’re working for.
So you want to spend time on keyword research, every time and use are the key points of keyword research. Again, understand your audience and what some of their pain points are or what they need, start looking for key root key words around those pain points and then create a brief around those keywords. That’s the map for the content you’re going to write.
And it’s going to ensure that all these elements that we’re going to talk about next are considered because you know, there’s kind of layers to this, right, you write the content, there’s also the SEO layer that comes on top of it. It’s hard to think about those at the same time. So it’s nice to plan that map so that you know, you know those things are going to land in your content. And then you have that map to refer back to when you kind of edit your content to ensure Okay, I got all these key elements to optimise this content as best I can.
So the first one, or the next one, I guess is keyword placement. So keyword research keyword placement. This is something you can really take care of in your brief and your keyword research part of writing. So use keywords and synonyms for target keywords throughout your content in an actual way. And then leverage money keyword areas to ensure that your target keywords get maximum exposure. So when you have that larger target keyword that you’re aiming for, there’s a few places that you want to put that. And if you look at some of the different articles that I’ve sent you, they’re pretty well optimised. You can even just start looking for this and things that you’re reading. And you’ll notice this but those key areas are the first 100 words of the page, the title and headings, the meta description and image alt text, an image file name. So these are most of these are things that you’ll have access to as a writer, image, maybe not.
But again, in case you’re doing your own blog, worth knowing about and certainly easy enough to do And you’ll notice too, that these kind of money keyword areas that I mentioning, these are other key parts of on page SEO in themselves. So having the keyword in there is one element, there’s some other elements of each one. And we will go through those, as well. So first 100 words, we’ve looked at a lot of searches around topic clusters. So I figured I’d just kind of keep rolling with that. But this snippet of text is from the market news blog. It’s the first or second organic result for the keyword topic clusters. And you’ll see that they are kind of ticking all the boxes when it comes to targeting that keyword, topic clusters.
So this is this section is 134 words long. And the word keyword topic clusters appears in there three times. So you don’t want to go crazy. You want to use it in a way that’s going to be clear to readers. Because readers like to see this too, they searched for this term, when they open the page, if they don’t see this term, their eyes are scanning for that too, because it’s like this is what they came to read about. So you want to do it in a way that’s serving readers. And that should also serve Google, you don’t need to put it in there 500 times you want to remember to put it in that first 100 words maybe once or twice, but it should still read naturally, normally. So when you edit your work, you can go through and check for these things and kind of read it aloud and see like, does this is this sound weird?
Does it sound okay for human? Because yes, this is for humans to read, ultimately, and we’re just helping Google understand what we’re trying to what information we’re trying to get across to humans. Okay, the next element, and another area where you want to see that keyword is the page title, title tag. The page title is the title that you see on the actual page. So on that previous page we looked at was it was what is topic clusters. And that’s also the search title. In the search results. It’s in some cases, the page title and what you might call the h1 or the title tag, are not the same. But in most cases they are. Um, let’s see, if you look at this example here, from the topic cluster search page, you can see that that keyword is present in every Page Title and Title Tag, you’ll also see that a lot of them will put that keyword near the front of the title.
There are some case studies around that, that show that using that keyword near the front of the title tag is beneficial. I mean, you can see it from both sides. It can be a Google thing, because it kind of speaks to the importance of of that keyword. But also for people again, that’s what they typed into the search engine, their eyes are scanning, that’s what they want to see. Again, though, I mean, you want to do it so that the title is actually descriptive, useful, properly depicts what’s on the page.
So you don’t have to go crazy with it, if you can naturally put it near the front. It’s worth a try. It’s also worth noting that sort of as of a Google update, around 2021, Google actually adjusts title tags itself, you know, to what it believes best describes the content on a page. So I think in the past, a lot of titles have been maybe a little bit click Beatty, they’re trying to get people to the page, there’s really no point in doing that, especially now.
It’s like, describe the content in a way that accurately describes what’s there. Because, you know, when people click through and they, what they thought they were getting doesn’t match with what they’re getting, they’re probably just going to bounce right back to the search results page. Anyway, that’s not good for
Tara Struyk 19:16
the performance of that page. Over time. Google wants to see that people are visiting that page and actually spending enough time there are engaging with it enough that they find it useful. So think about it like a person. Then think about these elements of SEO as well and how you can sprinkle that in. Oops, stuck here. There we go. Okay, so next element headings. So we saw this in the brief and we talked about this a little bit with the brief. So headings. I think you all know what headings and subheadings are in content.
Here’s a few from that market Muse blog, where they’re taught where they’re talking about A topic clusters are targeting that query. So you see what are the topic clusters, or why should consider topic clusters, the SEO impact of topic clustering to you on the page, those look like this, they’re in larger text. They’re above the paragraph. to Google, they look like this. So the title, h1 is the title tag.
And then all the tags beneath it, are those sub headings that you see. So typically, if you put these kind of in formatting in a Google Doc or whatever, there’s h two and H threes in a Google Doc, an editor could translate that into a content management system. Or if you have access to the content management system, or publishing on your own blog, there’s always a, you know, a drop down or some some toggle where you can highlight that section and put it in, in what tag you want. So you’re just helping Google see the page the same way that a person effects the formatting on the front end, too, but you’re helping them see the page the way a person would see it. So they can see that, you know, some of the key h h TOS are some of the key subheadings what is the topic cluster, why you should consider and then under those, you know, b2b Topic cluster example.
So it can kind of see what’s there can also help you rank for some of those specific sub keywords, right? Because Google can actually rank specific parts have a page for a query and take people to specific part of the page. So it’s just helpful to know how Google is reading that page, I got this from this is in the HTML. So what’s under the page, if you view the source of the page, you can also look at this really easily with the SEO PRO extension, which I’ve mentioned a few times. So you can just click it in your browser, and it’ll show you things like this.
So it’s kind of helpful to, to look at that. And I think content harmony kind of pulls this out, too, for all the ranking pages for a keywords that you can kind of see what other people are putting in their age to use. So that can be helpful. Okay, and then the next one is meta description. So again, this is what a meta description looks like in search results, it is the text that appears underneath the title.
It’s not considered a ranking factor, but it does affect click through rate. So what you put there could impact whether someone chooses your search result over someone else’s. And even if it’s not a factor, the keyword there, it’s still part of the metadata that Google sees, it can impact how they perceive the page.
The character limit for meta descriptions is about 150, to 160 characters, that’s just kind of how much will fit there. And it’s also recommended that you make this actionable. So remember, the goal here is to try to get people to visit your page. So some kind of a call to action can be helpful. Google does also rewrite a lot of these. But again, even if, if yours is rewritten, they still see the keywords that are there. So most people still recommend that your target keyword appears in that meta description.
Tara Struyk 23:38
Here, you can kind of see that it’s rewritten, right? So I pulled on the top, you can see where I pulled the actual meta description that appears in the code. From the SEO PRO extension, 90 a character so it’s false. Well, under the limit. It describes what’s on the page well, and, and what actually appears on the page on the search page Beneath that is a slightly edited version. We don’t know exactly why Google does this.
But they’re gathering a huge amount of data all the time in terms of what people are clicking. So they kind of have the ability to tweak these things. Because they want engagement on their search page as well. And image, all text and file name. So if you’re writing for someone, it probably won’t be your job to work on images, but maybe and it’s good to know, it’s good to understand that this is part of what Google sees when they look at the page.
So the alt text is text that you add to an image that basically tells Google what this image is. And it’s interesting to note that blind people using a screen reader also use this text to get a sense of what the images on the page are about. So obviously, if you can’t see an image is not really providing a lot of extra context for the content.
But if your screen reader tells you this image is of a person, you know, sitting on a chair, holding a dog on a front porch, then that person can actually understand what that image brings to the page. And it’s helpful to think about that aspect of it when you’re building your alt text, because we really want it to be descriptive and to accurately describe what that image is.
So the one you see on the slide here, I took from market muses blog, or market views is blog on topic clusters. And you can see that, that’s the image. And then the alt text behind the image is example of a content cluster for topic information, architecture, sewing some possibilities for content clusters. So it very accurately describes what’s in this image. It’s got keywords in it, which is nice if that, if that works out. And then the file name also describes what the content is.
So you know, in a lot of cases, when people save an image to their computer, it’ll be, you know, 12345 dot PNG or something, it’s, it’s good to rename it to actually describe what that image is just provides a little more information, another opportunity for a keyword. And it’s just best practice. And again, this information on the alt text, and the file name for the image came from SEO Pro.
So just an easy way to have a look at this, browse this on other sites, when you’re looking to understand how they’re doing it, and some sites will do it more carefully than others. And that all text is easy to add, it’s typically just in a content management system, a matter of clicking on the image, and there’s usually a field for that. So certainly easy to do, if you have access to that. And good thing to know about. And then kind of the last really big element of on page SEO is just the quality of the content. And of course, as a writer, you all have 100, you know, almost 100% control over this, you know, there’s going to be an editor, but you’re the one who really gets to drive the bus there in terms of content quality.
So what that means or how we kind of explain that is it meets the readers needs. It shows expertise, it’s easy and enjoyable to read, and provides unique information or insight, I think, to some degree, we all recognise this, when we see it, when you search for something, and you find a piece of content that really helps you for what you’re searching for. That you enjoy reading that isn’t, you know, a drag to read isn’t hard to read, is easy to navigate, kind of brings you through that idea in a way that that works in terms of subheadings you know that that’s a high quality piece of content. And then that also, you feel like you can trust. You kind of know it. And I think you know, we’ve talked a lot about reading, reading, like a writer or reading like an editor. That’s where you can watch for that and try to see what things are really standing out for you on those elements as a reader.
Ultimately, you know, we talk a lot about Google. But what Google is always trying to do in refining its algorithm is to view these pages more like a human being. And they actually have a group of people that they use called quality raters where they have they look at pages and assess pages in terms of content quality, and a lot of elements to help Google see if their algorithm actually is assessing pages like a person. Right? So there’s a lot of kind of human, there’s a there’s a strong human side to this.
So it’s important to understand all those elements. And then look, try to look at it from the audience’s perspective. So when we talk about quality, in terms of Google, and in terms of think how people view content, this is how Google portrays how they kind of look at content. So it’s got expertise, authority, and experience and all those things together. help build trust.
So we’ve kind of touched on a lot of these before and we’ll dig into some of these more in future classes, but it’s nice to kind of look at content through this lens Because honestly, when you see, or when I see content that’s a little bit lacking, it’s usually in one of these areas, right? It’s, it doesn’t have the expertise, or it doesn’t feel like the writer really knows what they’re talking about.
There’s a lot of fluff, they haven’t really leveraged. Someone who really knows this topic. There’s something missing there. Right. So I think that’s something that you can learn to look for, and learn to add to your own content. So expertise, experience authority, trust, that they call that EEA t. So the first one is experience. It’s often portrayed as something that has to come from the content creator.
With something like product reviews, it certainly should, I mean, you shouldn’t be writing a review of a product if you haven’t actually tested it. And if you are ever writing a review of a product, that’s really what you want to leverage, you don’t want to kind of rehash whatever’s on that product website or something like that, you really want to focus on your own experience. That’s the unique and useful information that you can provide for someone else, right.
But I don’t, but content created by someone with experience, it is performing better these days, in a lot of cases, but a lot of content that references people with experience and leverages, people with experience is also performing really well. So I think you don’t necessarily have to review it, view it as being first person and certainly, as a writer, you know, kind of by trade, we’re often not an expert in one topic. If you work in a certain niche, or a certain topic area for a long time, you’ll certainly develop a lot of expertise. But you know, even if you write about finance, I wrote about finance for a long time. I’m not a financial analyst, you know, I’m not a trader, I don’t have that level of expertise. And I never will. So some expertise can definitely come from that writer side. But we have to also learn as writers to leverage other people’s expertise. This slide kind of talks about expertise a little bit. This one talks about expertise, a little bit more. This comes from
Tara Struyk 32:34
Google’s quality rater guidelines. So this is something that SEOs tend to dig through quite a bit because it gives them a sense of how they’re trying to assess quality in content. So just understanding that helps people kind of better create that type of content. It’s interesting, because it kind of shows where experience is really valuable, and where expertise is really valuable. And I’d argue in some of these topics. Both could be important.
But you know, you can certainly leverage for first person, like in a review, if you’re sort of the target audience for whatever you’re reviewing. And the point of a review is experience. That’s a perfect opportunity to use experience. And there are certainly times where people want experience like this is part of the appeal of sites like Reddit, where people say, you know, I have this problem. What are your experience? You know, what do you think?
What’s your experience, these aren’t typically experts responding, these are just other people who can say, well, I, you know, I tried this, or this was my experience, that can be helpful. And then there are some times where experience like here, they’ve got some examples of medical, I mean, when it comes to expertise, you want expertise when it comes to recommendations about your health, maybe recommendations about your money, things that are really important in high stakes, that’s where expertise becomes much more important. And then the last, or the next one on EEA t, so EEA now authoritativeness. And so these aren’t all things that you have control over as a writer, but they’re good to be aware of, and some of them are things you can work on.
So a piece of content about topic clusters, which we’ve been looking at has a better chance of ranking if it’s posted on the site that’s recognised for writing lots of high quality content about content marketing and SEO. So Google sees okay, this, this piece of content is about content marketing and SEO in this site has kind of proven that it is an authority in this topic. People visit it for this people link to it for this so maybe this is a good result. out. Because this particular site knows what it’s talking about, that can extend to the writer as well. So certainly writers focus in specific niches, in a lot of cases, and that’s where you can have some control.
So if you write about tech, or SEO, or whatever, you know, food over a long time, Google can see your byline on that content and start to view you as having authority. If that’s content that performs well, is on other sites that have authority for that topic area. So you’re posting tech content on some high profile tech sites, you can build that authority yourself, and that can help your content, rank and perform better. And again, when you think of that, from the reader perspective to they’re gonna click on the author bio, they’re gonna see oh, yeah, this person was published in these other sites, they’ve been writing about tech for this many years. Sounds like I can probably trust this person’s reporting.
On this topic, there’s some authority. So I think that’s, that’s one aspect that you can think about in your in your career. And it’ll also help you get those jobs is having that authority going out to people and saying that you have experience in that niche. But that’s one part of authority, that you have some control over beyond the site level. And then finally, kind of the lowest level as you can link the page to other high quality sources.
So you want to have sources in your content, you want to cite data, you want to make sure you’re linking to the highest quality sources for that topic. So not just, you know, some blog post or something like that, something that really is the top level, trustworthy, best source of information for whatever it is you’re reading about. And you can see if you remember the first picture, authority, expertise, experience, and then trust in the middle.
So all these elements kind of feed into trust, right? We have all these in place that helps make the page more trustworthy. That’s the kind of overlapping part and the middle, all of them are key to establishing trust. What that means kind of depends on the site, it’s on the content itself, right? I mean, if you’re just writing a post, that’s designed to be funny, to make people laugh, it may just have to be really funny, and lots of people share it, and it’ll perform really well.
But if you’re giving out if you’re talking about something higher stakes business, or health or finance, the bar is going to be much higher in terms of making that page feel accurate, safe and reliable. And in terms of the Google quality raters that those are the some of the key things that they are taught to look for is, you know, is this page trustworthy? How do I see trust as a human? Is the search engine kind of seeing trust in the same way? Right? Again, the search engines goal is to surface content that is the best result. And that a human would see as the best result if they were able to sift through these 10s of 1000s of pages. Yeah, so that’s kind of EEA T in a nutshell, or on page SEO. So I’ll open it up to questions. If anybody has questions about what we’ve gone through, or the reading. Let’s hear
Philip Maigida 38:37
i have questions. Good. Good afternoon. Can you hear me?
Tara Struyk 38:41
Yeah, I hear you loud and clear. All right.
Philip Maigida 38:46
My first question is, is about images. So first, my first question is, where do where do you find images, images that you can use for? Should I just ask all my questions at once or?
Tara Struyk 39:03
No, we have lots of time. So I’d say go for it. I’ll add maybe it’s easier if I answer them one at a time. So your question, how do you find images that you can use?
Tara Struyk 39:16
So, I mean, they’re certainly stock photos. But we all know that stock photos. You know, they make the page look pretty. They don’t necessarily add a lot of information or context to the page. If you were doing images, yourself, you could try something like Canva, which it makes it easy to create things like charts or things like that, that kind of help explain your content.
So that’s one thing you could do and certainly, a lot of people who create their own images might try something like that. It’s fairly easy to use and I think they’re other options like that we saw in Shamas, article about content or content marketing or marketing yourself on LinkedIn that you used screencaps of people’s LinkedIn page.
So that actually worked quite well. And that’s, you know, a screengrab of another page is typically, okay, it kind of depends on the context. But in that case, it’s certainly fine. And it kind of gives you know, she’s talking about a person that way we can see that person’s face on LinkedIn, without having to leave the page. So it kind of breaks up the text provides a little bit of additional information, instead of saying, like, oh, this person’s LinkedIn page says this, which is not very fun to read, she just kind of circles like, here’s the elements that they did well.
So there’s different things that you can do, it kind of depends on what it requires, but mostly an informational content, you probably want to do something that makes understanding the content easier. So some kind of a chart, there’s lots of software, give us common ninja where you can make a nice like, table. So let’s say you’re comparing three different things, you can have a table where you, you know, kind of show how all these things compare. So there’s lots of tools and a lot of them are free or close to free, or at least have a free version that that people can access. So I’d probably look there first. And and see what you when you can create.
Philip Maigida 41:38
Okay, watch for that. Yeah. So next question is, is there a hotkey you’ve asked actually answer the second question in, in, in as well as the first one. So the third question is, is the image? Supposed is the image the alt text alternative? Alternative Text? I don’t know. Which one exactly it is? Is it supposed to carry a description of the image or the key word? Which one?
Tara Struyk 42:13
It should have a key word if, as long as it makes sense. And it’s probably, you know, it’s probably there to clarify your key words, since that’s what you’re writing about. And it should accurately describe what that image is. So again, like think of that screen reader that the blind person screen readers like, I can’t see. So the screen is reading the content to me.
Picture what, what would be helpful to help that person understand what the image is about, that’s kind of what the alt text should be like a sentence or so that says, you know, you’ll often see alt texts where it’ll just say, like, puppies or something, but it’s really three golden retrievers running through a field of flowers. That’s like an accurate description of what’s what that image is. So I would say, ultimately, you kind of want to be fair, give a given accurate, accurate description. And I guess in that case, I hope that your content is about Golden Retrievers.
Philip Maigida 43:21
Thank you very much, that they’ll be over now.
Tara Struyk 43:26
Anybody else? Okay. You can always send questions in the Slack channel as well happy to answer those. So, I’m gonna give a bigger homework this time. I think with the information you have, you’re all ready for this. And I think this way you can work on it over a longer time period, I can kind of help you along. But let’s say you are each starting your own blog to promote yourself as a writer, content marketer, whatever it is that you want.
And then you should like to be working in. So I want the assignment to be that you come up with your first blog posts. So define your target audience and figure out who they are, who didn’t. Who do you want on your blog? What kind of people do you think are going to be ultimately clients for you, and then do your keyword research and create a brief the title there and then write the post. So I’ll give three weeks to work on this.
Next week, since we’re kind of halfway ish. I’ll schedule one on ones with everybody. So I’d recommend kind of giving this some thought at least if not starting it before next week. And that way, if you’re needing some help before we really dig into the meat of it then in the one on one, I can maybe help you there and we can talk it through that might be helpful.
then, you know, I can kind of provide some help over that, the course of those weeks and then I think what we’ll do, once that’s turned in is we’ll work on continuing to refine that blog post over the following weeks. So I can kind of help you with some of the writing. We’ll talk a bit about that.
We’ll, we’ll talk about sources, we can kind of build that into our posts so that hopefully, by the end of the class, you’ll have kind of the best posts that you’re able to do the best piece of content that you’re able to do kind of pulling together all the things that we’re learning, so I think it’ll be fun. And I’ll certainly have a good time reading that that’s what I like to do.
So I think that’ll be a good exercise for me to to get to kind of edit and read through all your posts. So yeah, next week, we’ll, we’ll aim to do a one on one I’ll figure out maybe send out a Calendly, inviter something and block off the times that people can meet one on one so you can just choose choose a time and we will kind of connect for for 20 minutes and I can hopefully help you. So that I think is it
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