What is SEO or Search Engine Optimization?

SEO is pretty much a list of tasks you can do both on and off your website, blog, etc that will help attract potential consumers.

What are the pros of good SEO practices?

• For one, it gets your brand discovered.  That’s right.  Your Brand.  The thing you have been working hard to establish ever since the day you decided to become a published author or established blogger.
• Once you get used to SEO it becomes quick and simple.  What was once tedious and time-consuming becomes a habit.

So what exactly is SEO all about?  SEO is all about the content of your blogs, your website, and your published works.   Your content strategy feeds into your SEO strategy.

Let’s say you are writing a fantasy adventure series (like The Sanctorian Series).  The main point of your blog/website is to entice potential consumers to buy your finished product.  So you wouldn’t blog about gardening or the infrastructure of the White House.  The consumers that would read those posts are most likely not out looking for the next book on their TBR list.  You would blog about things your readers would be looking for: short stories, poems, blogging techniques, marketing, etc.

If you want your site to rank well, you need to put most of your SEO efforts into providing information that is useful and relevant for your audience.

What should you do to optimize your SEO strategy?

Step #1: Optimize your images

• Provide ALT-tags for every image you attach to your blog or website.  ALT-tags are descriptions of your images on your webpage.  Keet the ALT-tag short and to the point.  Use your keywords as much as possible and be descriptive.
• Name your image file.  I name mine the same as the title of my blog post.  Use hyphens instead of a space between words (i.e. An-Epic-Fantasy-Adventure)
• Do not name the file name the same as the ALT-tag.  Think of them as keywords.  You want to tie as many keywords as possible to your image to increase discoverability.

Step #2: Choose Your Keywords Wisely

• Use your keywords as part of your title or subtitle.
• Choose keywords that have a high search volume.
• There are free tools out there you can use to help choose your keywords.  Personally, I tend to go to google and choose my keywords based off of what pops up when I start to search for what I am blogging about.  For example: before I started this blog I went to google and typed in SEO.  Several options popped up:  SEO and Amazon, SEO meaning, SEO Optimization, and SEO marketing.

Do your research and be intentional about what you write.