Intro to SEO post for Fashion & Lifestyle bloggers:
Every budding blogger wants to have their website perfectly primed to put on a great face and be the one to watch. Want to know how? Get a great foundation with the essentials of SEO in this introduction to our series on SEO basics and best practices.
SEO: It's the foundation, like a good BB Creme, for your website.
Just as you'd prime your face with the best tools, BFrow will give you the tools to create and execute the SEO of your fashion or lifestyle blog flawlessly.
Whether you have been running your website or blog for years or you are a novice, it's good to go over some SEO basics and tips on best practices so you can prime your site, jazz it up, and get stunning results.
In this series, we're going to review SEO's makeup together, you'll learn some helpful information, you may review some things you already know, and we're going to have your site at top-notch performance level to make it work for you.
Ready? Roll up your sleeves and let's dive in.
What is SEO, anyway?
Have you ever gone to a cosmetologist who threw out jargon to you that you thought you understood, but didn't really? Wikipedia or an SEO expert can tell you that "Search Engine Optimization affects a web page's organic search results," but what the heck does that mean?
The first part of this series is about what search engine optimization is and what it is not.
SEO is:
A method of communicating to the search engines about your site so they will recommend your website for relevant users' searches.
Intuitive and user-friendly.
Focused on traffic, not rankings.
Multi-channel.
Consistent.
It's really important to have a clear understanding of what SEO is not:
SEO is not just metrics, analytics, and rankings.
SEO is not effective when you focus on short-tail keywords.
SEO is not a quick fix.
SEO is not something you pay for.
SEO is not a one-trick pony.
SEO is not a way to cheat search engines.
(Be sure to come back to our blog for the next part of this series, which will go more in depth about what SEO is not.)
SEO, point by point:
Search engine optimization affects a web page's organic search results. "Organic search results" are the ones you get on Google, for example, that directly relate to what you searched for, and are not paid advertisements or pay-per-click links.
If you search for "Fashion Bloggers in Tel Aviv," you'll get results like this:
Regardless of how much money Karen Or of Street Chic Tel Aviv and Korin Avraham of Yasalam may have, they didn't have to pay to appear at the top of the search engine results page (SERP) because the content on their websites is all about their Tel Aviv fashion blogs, and is most relevant to the search query.
While your website or blog may not be as big as the Karen's, you can still highly benefit from optimizing your site so that it will appear high in SERPs and you won't have to pay your hard-earned money to get it there.
2. SEO is a method of communicating to the search engines about your site so they will recommend your website for relevant users' searches. That means making it easy for Google, Yahoo!, etc., to see how your site relates to a user's search query. Simply put, it means paying attention to:
The content on your site. "Content is king!" might be an annoying mantra or seem cliché these days, but that doesn't make it any less true. If you want to have your page high on a SERP like the Korin's page, then your text, titles, and links need to be all about fashion in Tel Aviv (get where I'm going with this?).
User experience. If your visitors have to click all around to find the information they're looking for on your webpage or blog, or if they just get frustrated and leave altogether, you will have high bounce rates, and in this case, high numbers are not good. Search engines (and people) don't like them, so it's worth it to you to improve user experience.
Improve your website and give them added value so they'll stay around a long time (long times on your site are great numbers that search engines like, too).
3. Intuitive and user-friendly. Speaking of bounce rates and user experience, make your website or blog easy to navigate by designing it intuitively-- see it as an experience through the eyes of your visitors and make your site make sense to new and returning visitors. Just because you know your sitemap and where to click for information doesn't mean that your visitors do, too.
Another important point about your site being intuitive is to consider which keywords (what someone types in a search engine's query box) that would lead them to you (and would help the search engine recommend your site).
Know that long-tail keywords are the tools visitors use, even though they are harder to pinpoint. Long-tail keywords (versus short-tail) are searches like "best coverups for the beach," "versatile leather bag for travel for women," or "little black dress for romantic evening out." You're right in thinking that it can be impossible to know all of the words, phrases, and combinations of them that people will use in a search, but if you think more like a site visitor, you can begin to intuit what people will search for that should lead them to you, and you will add that text to the content on your site.
4. Focused on traffic, not rankings. If you have been led to believe that SEO is all about getting on the first page of Google's search engine results page, you've been led down the wrong path (and you should be sure to read more about that in this series). Search engine optimization focuses on your site's traffic. Would you rather have your keywords rank you on a SERP in first place but only deliver about 100 visitors in a month, or would you rather poll in at 8th place with a delivery of over 1,000 visitors in a month?
Your site's performance-- conversion rates-- matter more than which position your site takes on a SERP. And if you're in the business of making money, promoting and educating, and generating interest with your website or blog, you know that conversion is the name of the game.
5. Multi-channel. SEO isn't just for your website or blog alone. Like a well-stocked cosmetics bag, it requires many important parts to make it work well as a whole. So in addition to your site, you must put your efforts into other platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, email, and external ads (if you can afford them), etc.
Using social media is so important because search engine's crawlers are looking everywhere, so you have to be everywhere. Create and maintain a Facebook business or fan page. Tweet, tweet, and tweet some more. Join communities on G+ and contribute to the conversation. Do these things with everything tied to or linking back to your site.
6. And finally, SEO is consistent. If your keywords and domain names are different (even the difference between "www.yoursitename.com" and "yoursitename.com" is an impactful one), they will instantly dry out your foundation, so to speak. Consistency is key in your efforts, as with any goal.