Get More Reads: How To Rank Better on Google With SEO

SEO is easy, and it can get you more views if you know how to use it

What is SEO?

“SEO” stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s simply the art of ranking high on search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. to make your content visible to people. The better visibility you have the more people will view your site, which can lead to customers.

The reason it works is that programmed bots constantly look through sites and gather information to see which pages are most relevant to a given keyword. The bots or the algorithm is complex and consists of hundreds of factors to determine where a specific webpage should be ranked.

Benefits of using SEO

In the fight for attention on the World Wide Web, many businesses choose to pay for ads to rank higher, while others just use SEO, which can be much more powerful if done correctly.

SEO is free the only thing you have to pay for is your time because it can be a time-consuming task to rank high on search engines. More benefits are:

• Increases the organic discovery of your page and drives quality traffic to it
• 24/7 promotion
• Increases credibility
• SEO offers a great return on investments
• Optimizes the user experience and the relevancy of your page

And many other things.

If those benefits are some you would like to receive on your Medium articles, then keep reading to learn how to use SEO.

How to optimize your articles with SEO to rank higher?

We covered the benefits, and must now look into how to use SEO for your articles. The whole process is divided into the following sections: Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, MOZ, Density, Layout, and page SEO.

Keyword planner

When you know what you want to write about, the first step is to use Google Keyword Planner, which is a free keyword tool provided by Google itself.

In the planner tool, you type in your keyword or keywords for the topic you want to write about. For illustration purposes only, I typed in “Rank on Google”, and you can see how the planner tool spits out other relevant keywords that I could consider ranking for.

Then I look into those keywords’ volume (monthly average searches), and because the planner tool is free, it doesn’t provide you with exact information. It can range from 100–1,000 or 10,000–100,000, which are huge gaps. Thus the planner tool should only give you some inspiration before moving on to the next step.

Ubersuggest

The next step is to use Ubersuggest, which is a free/not-free tool. By free/not free I mean you have 3 daily free keyword searches, and if you want more you’ll have to pay for it. However, 3 is enough for me, so I guess it will also be for you.

In Ubersuggest, you type in the keyword(s) from Google Keyword Planner, that you think is relevant and would do great for your article. Again, I typed in “Rank on Google”, and got the keywords above. As you can see, these are quite good results. Most of the keywords have above 500 monthly searches and an SEO difficulty below 20 (the right side of the image). This means that I should be able to compete on those keywords. For instance, ranking on google search could be one thing I would implement into my article — so I just did.

Experiment with it, and you will quickly see some great results.

Moz

Next up is a free Chrome extension called “Moz”. When using this extension you can see a page’s domain authority (DA) and its page authority (PA).

You can use this information to see if you can compete with pages that are already up on google. For instance in the image above the second article has a PA of 48 and a DA of 59, which is not bad, but neither is it good.

You can increase your DA by being authentic and trustworthy. For instance, the website Medium has a DA of 95, meaning they’ll almost every time beat other competitors on the DA, thus ranking higher.

The PA will on the other hand vary depending on how easy the page is to navigate, its relevancy, bounce rate, overall quality, etc. That’s something you can optimize from time to time.

Focus on the PA and DA, and

Density

This step is about your article. When writing your article you must be sure to maintain a density of about 1%. This means if you are writing about tech, then the keyword tech must show up one percent of the time throughout the article. You can try to count the SEO keyword in this article to see if I made it.

By doing this you help the algorithm to know what you want to rank for, and you show the search engine “hey, this is a relevant page for that specific keyword”.

Layout

It is alpha-omega that your article is easy to navigate because most people are not here to read but to scan for useful information. So if they cannot find it fast, they will leave, and this will tell the algorithm “this page is not relevant”, and your ranking will be downgraded.

Thus you must implement a “table of contents”, headlines, and titles (big and small), split the text up to make it easier to swallow, use bullet points if necessary, and make sure all text implemented is relevant to the user’s search.

Another quick tip is to put your keyword in italics, bold, quotation marks, headlines, titles, and in the table of contents. And if you have a conclusion, also put it in there. If you go through this article you will find that I did this.

Conclusion

• You can beat paid ads with great SEO, and you will be promoting yourself 24/7
• Remember density, layout, and page SEO, when writing an article
• To get some good inspiration use Keyword planner and Ubersuggest
• Use the Chrome extension “MOZ” to see if you have a chance of competing
• Relevancy, navigation, user experience, and valuable information are key to SEO.

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