From the course: SEO Copywriting: Crafting Content for Both Humans and Search Engines

SEO foundations for content writing

From the course: SEO Copywriting: Crafting Content for Both Humans and Search Engines

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SEO foundations for content writing

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- You might understand that the acronym SEO refers to search engine optimization. But do you understand the major activities that support the end goal of ranking high and relevant search? Let's talk about the three pillars of SEO, how they work together and how that impacts your web writing approach. First, there's on-page SEO, which can be generally referred to as content. This pillar is concerned with how you create and optimized content on your website. Specifically, it deals with keyword research and how you use it on each page, in addition to following other best practices for optimizing individual content assets. Keywords are the terms you're attempting to rank for on the search engine results pages or SERPs. For every SEO driven piece of content on your website, there are multiple opportunities to rank on the SERPs in terms of primary keywords, your main target, secondary keywords, related targets, and other SERP features, like the featured snippet. I'll share more about featured snippets later in this course. This course is primarily focused on on-page SEO. Since all pillars are essential for finding success with SEO, I'll discuss the two remaining pillars. The second pillar is off-page SEO, which can generally be referred to as backlinks. Backlink building can help you rank higher in relevant search. Backlinks help you build authority via external links pointing to your website. Domain authority is the measure of the strength of the backlinks pointing to your website. The closer the number is to 100, the better a website's domain authority. And finally, there's technical SEO, which encapsulates several aspects of a website structure and technical setup. This involves your choice of platform, hosting, to design, security, integrations, page load speed, mobile friendliness, and other user experience factors. It's also concerned with indexability, the website's ability to be included in relevant search and crawlability, the search engine spider's ability to navigate your pages without technical issues. When it comes to on-page SEO, indexability is a function of great keyword research and descriptiveness in its implementation. With support from the other pillars, off-page SEO and technical SEO, you'll be poised well to rank content assets and relevant search.

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