The basics of search engine optimization (SEO)
As someone who is building their personal brand, you may be wondering… “What does this have to do with my brand?” According to Patel (2020), SEO can help garner more traffic to your website, improve your social performance by creating higher engagement, and build your brand’s authority. By implementing the basics of search engine optimization, you will be able to build momentum and help increase your brand’s visibility.
Although there are many things that come to play when optimizing your website for search, below are a couple of basics to help get you started:
Tip 1: Curate content, constantly
In order to build awareness of your personal brand, you need to create content beneficial to your audience. According to Search Engine Journal (2020), “If you want organic search visibility, rankings, and traffic, you have to commit yourself to the grind of consistently creating optimized content” (pg. 1).
Search Engine (2020), notes that in order for your content to the maximize the potential SEO value, it needs to be:
- Useful and informative to your audience
- More valuable than your competitors
- Of high credibility and quality
- And engaging to your audience
You’ve created your content, now what? For this quality content that you have created to be useful to Google, it also needs to be optimized for Google’s search engine.
Tip 2: Make sure your content is keyword optimized
As mentioned earlier, content is very important for your branding strategy, but it is also very important for SEO. High quality content drives traffic and leads to your website. In order to do this, you need to identify what keywords are important to your personal branding strategy, and ensure they are utilized throughout your website (Patel, 2020).
Keywords are what tell search engines whether your content is relevant or not. You should use your target keywords in your H1 title, meta-descriptions and URL (Patel, 2020).
Some helpful links below:
Tip 3: Include links in your content
According to Search Engine Journal (2020), “Google has made it clear that credibility is an important SEO factor, linking to relevant, trustworthy, and authoritative sites can help ensure that search engines see your content as credible” (pg. 1). The optimal amount of relevant links to include in your posts, is no more than 6 (Search Engine Journal, 2020).
Additionally, backlinks act as a vote of confidence to Google, so you also want to try and get credible websites to link to your page. As more sites link to the same website, search engines conclude that content is worth linking to and also worth sharing in their search results (Moz, 2020).
Now, you’re probably wondering, “How do I get sites to backlink to my content?”. To help get you started, check out the guides below:
Just remember, this is barely scratching the surface when it comes to building your visibility through search engine optimization. As you get more comfortable with optimizing your content, we highly recommend checking out Neil Patel, Moz and Search Engine Journal to learn more on the topic.
References:
Moz. (2020.) Backlinks. Moz. Retrieved from https://moz.com/learn/seo/backlinks#:~:text=Why%20are%20backlinks%20important%3F,others%20vouch%20for%20your%20content.
Patel, N. (2020). How to use SEO to build your brand. Neil Patel. Retrieved from https://neilpatel.com/blog/how-to-use-seo-to-build-your-brand/
Search Engine Journal. (2020). WHy content is important for SEO. Search Engine Journal. Retrieved from https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-101/content-important-seo/
Brand New You 