When you first get started with blog posting, social media marketing, and building your online presence, it can be overwhelming to keep all the elements of a great post in mind. You need to connect with your audience, share something of value, make your words sound like your brand personality, make sure grammar and spelling are correct – and then there are the algorithms. Search engine optimization makes sure your work can be found – but learning how to start with SEO can be tricky. Here are five tips to keep in mind.

Do Research on Competitor SEO

Search engine optimization is a very competitive landscape, and it’s a good idea to find out what keywords and phrases your competitors are targeting. There are a lot of tools out there that help you analyze posts from competitors to find the words and phrases that are drawing in the audience. You may want to focus on similar keywords and phrases, or you may choose to stay away from certain keywords to ensure that you aren’t competing with an industry giant.

Track and Analyze Changes in Your Rank

Using search engine optimization does nothing if you aren’t learning from it. Be sure that you are tracking how well your SEO keywords are working by watching your page ranking and looking at the analytics for your website. As you analyze the status of each page, you can begin to see how your keywords are working, or not – and can make changes to adjust.

Remember the Metadata and SEO Tags

One thing that many first-time SEO writers forget are things that aren’t seen by the reader. Page tags, metadata, and even the page’s URL title can be optimized for search engine algorithms. These are great places to use your target keywords that draw in users searching for content like yours. And the page title, which is seen on the page by the readers, is a great place to use long-tail key phrases.

Use Links to Help Make Your Site Visible

Another key point about SEO tactics is link building. This means that you link your content to other content, and that helps “teach” Google’s algorithm what your content is relevant to. This means that the algorithm will be able to better sort and rank you in the future. Your ultimate goal should be to make your content so great that other sites want to link to you.

There Are SEO Professionals Who Can Help

The last thing to know about search engine optimization is that you don’t have to do it alone. There are professionals out there that have decades of experience in optimizing content to stand out and grow a business. If you want the best chance possible to have great content that is perfectly optimized, Organically can help. Learn more about our services here.