Are you a journalist? Do you create impactful articles every day, but every time the conversion figures are low, and your target audience gets lost in all the informative noise in the blue ocean of the Internet? Looks like the time has come to do SEO or at least fully understand it. Digital agency SEOLITTE is ready to lend its shoulder to the strengthening of explanatory journalism and offers you a guide to optimizing a news site.
Before proceeding to the detailed explanation of the SEO phenomenon, it is appropriate to mention that it goes hand in hand with the marketing and communication strategy of the journalistic institution. That is, it must be done jointly with the use of the rest of the promotional tools. In this way, the results will not be delayed.
Stage no. 1: Creating a suitable structure for indexing
This is an important phase of the site optimization process, as this is where site architecture errors are detected and the keyword strategy to be applied by an SEO specialist is determined. We pause at this stage because chronologically it is preceded by another vital element: keyword analysis. Keywords are nothing more than triggers for connection with search engines, respectively for the creation of extensive valuable content, they must be carefully chosen and be explicitly connected to the nature of the object or service that the journalist is analyzing. It works just like a red flag in the hands of a bullfighter (the allegory between Google and keywords). Google sees them and starts indexing the skyrocketing content.
On average, around 10-50% of a site's structure is changed at this stage, updating headings and adding new content, all of which are intended to improve the indexing process on search engines.
Stage no. 2: Internal website optimization
This is the most extensive stage of work because it depends on:
- Writing SEO tags (Title tags, Meta Descriptions, Open Graph tags) - Meta tags of a site must sound as attractive as possible, be unique for each page, contain the most important keywords, and have a suitable length.
- Creating headings that are meant to highlight the most important elements of the page's content and tell search engines what the page is about. It is recommended to create unique Headings:
- H1 tag - the most important title on the page;
- H2 tag - the second most important title on the page.
Stage 3: creating PR and Brand strategies in Off-page SEO
We reach an important dimension, which is directly related to the presence and truthfulness, or the validation of a portal on Google. SEO is a mechanism based on gaining the trust of search engines, respectively we also need the offline dimension.
Off-page SEO means increasing the popularity level of the website, using PR and Link-building techniques and tools. Link Building consists of directing and relevant links to the site that wants to be indexed. At this stage, brand visibility and website authority are increased by implementing various link-building strategies. Accordingly, commercial and massive informational articles are written, in which active links are integrated, so that search engines notice the interest of the public and bring the journalistic material closer to the target audience. Let's not forget that search engines work on the principle of building trust, so it takes them some time (on average about 6 months) to believe in a brand new brand, no matter how reliable it may seem.
From all of the above, each journalist can extract a certain working ploy to bring their intellectual work to the convenient product market.