The most important thing I’ve learn about seo-friendly text is that text is meant to be text, period. We all know your compositions with photos and text look great on a JPG (and your followers must love them), but the true story is that if you want people to find your blog through seach engines, text on a image is not getting you there. Browsers are smart but they still cannot read images.
I became aware of this fact the hard way. I used to think “If I keep posting about my highest-ranking search term, why can’t I see results?” Well, little did I know it was because all my content was on a super pretty image, with cute typography and an amazing design (at least to me it was amazing).
Search engines like Google use algorithms to search through your blog and categorize the content on it. This algorithm looks for text, so what is actually powerful about having images on your posts is the title, description and alternative text you assign to each one of them.
To spare you the trouble I experienced, I’ve listed these 5 basic and simple SEO text guidelines to put in practice when you are creating new posts for your blog.
1. Let your words be text and keep your writing style simple. Even though you might sound very professional using fancy words, most people use and digest casual language when they’re online. (For example, The New York Times is written at about an 8th grade reading level.)
2. Give your images a proper and descriptive name. Girl, nobody is searching for “img_1989” when looking to find images of red dresses!
3. Both Blogger and WordPress have the option to give your images a specific title and alternative text. Take an extra minute to fill them in and help browsers categorize your images better.
4. Put your keywords in your post titles. This is where they can be most powerful.
5. Don’t forget to write naturally. I know they power of keywords but nobody likes phrases like this one: “Yellow shoes are in, I love yellow shoes, yellow shoes are my favorite ones, yellow shoes, yellow shoes, yellow shoes!” You could end up losing some readers for being phony, and even search engines know when you are trying to cheat.
What have you learned about SEO-friendly text the hard way?
By Esa Mtz, of Fashion Blog Mexico.
I’m still getting to grips with SEO and feel like I’m only making a teeny tiny difference when writing. LOL. But I guess some posts stand out more than others, especially when they deal with an important event happening somewhere. i.e Fasion Week, therefore you would get more hits online