August 2020

Optimising Your News Articles for Search Engine Ranking

---

More than ever search engines are being designed for the user rather than robot crawlers therefore when trying to increase the Google ranking of your newsletter articles, blogs, and promotional landing pages on your website, you need to think like a human.

In April 2020 we took some time to review the Google stats of the newsletter articles on our website. Upon analysis of the data we made some adjustments. We always implement the following on-page SEO techniques but investing the time in a regular review allows us to consider refinements that can be undertaken, often equating in improvement in our organic page rank. The results of this recent review have been impressive with one of our articles receiving a total of 465 visits, 230 since implementing changes in April.

Here is a simple Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) checklist to consider when preparing your small business online content:

Select your keywords

When choosing to write an article consider your topic and the associated keywords that your audience will use to find your thought leadership on the topic. Focus your content on a selection of keywords and keyword phrases. To help identify keywords that are important to your subject matter use Google’s Keyword Planner Tool to refine your list.

Optimise your articles for SEO

Many of our clients are now managing their own news/blog section on their website. Here is a brief outline of five elements you should implement when trying to optimise your content for search engine results.

Page Title

This is the clickable link displayed on the search engine results page; it helps Google determine what your page is about. Guidelines include:

• Make every page title unique
• Use no more than 69 characters
• Include your most important keyword

Meta Description

This is displayed below the page title and describes the page content. Guidelines include:

• Use no more than 156 characters
• Include keywords you have selected

URL Address

Your page name is important to Google and should include keywords. Guidelines include:

• Include important keywords
• Words can be broken up with a hyphen, avoid underscores

Heading Tags

Google recognises the copy in your heading tags as more important than your page content. The H1 tag is the most important, working down in importance to H6. Guidelines include:

• Never use more than one H1 per page
• Include your most important keywords
• Use H2 and H3 for subtitles and to break up page content

Anchor Text

Anchor text are the words that the hyperlink displays when linking to another document or location on the web. Anchor text provides Google and users contextual information about the content of the links destination. Guidelines include:

• Use words that will encourage the user to click the link
• Do not make them overly keyword heavy
• Do not use “Click here”!

Build quality links to your website

One technique to gain a higher search result in Google is to acquire high quality links to your website. These need to be reputable links, for example to like-minded businesses that support your customers. Do not be fooled by SEO companies promising the world by building your backlinks, in some cases Google has penalised businesses as these links have not been to respected websites. Another strategy for building quality links to your website is guest blogging in your field of expertise and reaching out to other website owners to publish your material.

When building your website, we implement these and other on-page SEO techniques. We then support you in maintaining and improving your Google rankings, brand awareness and marketing by offering an Annual Online Digital Health Check.

---

If you need support to improve your online presence book an appointment today, an annual review could make all the difference.