Social Media Guide for Wattpad

More SEO, Because, SEO

This is big. It’s huge. It’s any other adjective for enormousness that you like. Search Engine Optimization cannot be ignored. 

Why?

Content Jobs

Back when I was talking about Facebook, I mentioned that your content has a number of jobs. But let’s boil them down to three.

1.       Be seen

2.        Be experienced (read, listened to, shared, etc.)

3.       Help with conversions (however you define them, e. g. book purchase, get more reviews, get more followers, whatever)

SEO does Job One

Let’s repeat that. SEO does Job One. It helps your content to be seen. SEO is important for any website you create. It’s important for your blog. It’s a little less vital for your Twitter page and the like, but it is still helpful. After all, let’s say you and 50,000 other people have Tumblr blogs about Daniel Day-Lewis. 

You want to be on the first page of results when people search for information on Daniel Day-Lewis. And you want to be first even when people within Tumblr do the searching (most searching within social sites is done more or less the same way as it’s done on search engines directly. Do well on one, and you’ll be doing well on the other, most of the time).

What’s Good Enough?

Consider this – there are over a trillion web pages out there, right now. Google hasn’t indexed them all yet, although they’re trying. So let’s do a search on something we know is huge. 

Rabbit – yes, just type rabbit into Google. When I drafted this chapter, I found nearly 65 million hits for that one term. Will you look at page 148 of these search results? Nope. 

And neither will anyone else. 

What is the percentage of people who don’t go beyond the first page of results? 

75. 

There are about a dozen results on each page (the numbers vary, as news or videos might take up more real estate). That means that there are about 64,999,982 links, spread out over about 5.5 million pages of search results, that ¾ of everyone searching will never see. 

Don’t be in that crowd. 

How?

Long Tail/Short Tail

I mentioned this a bit in the strategy section but the bottom line is that short tail is this naked term, rabbit. It’s not terribly descriptive and it matches, as you can see, a ton of webpages. But the long tail is a more detailed search; e. g. feed orphan baby rabbits. Now the number of returns is about 101,000. That’s still a high number, yes. But it’s a much smaller mountain to climb. Now the search results are spread out over around 8,400 or so pages. 

Here’s an even better long tail search: feeding baby rabbits skim milk. That one returns only about 51,000 results, or around half of the first long tail search that we tried.

What are long tail searches good for?

They are good for figuring out content, either for new pages or to add to preexisting content. They are good for figuring out which applicable key words to add. Experiment! You might do better substituting nonfat or low-fat or dry or condensed or evaporated instead of the word skim.

Where do I get long tail ideas from?

Do some searching! And spend some time with your own analytics. Recognize that a lot of searches are suppressed. This is because Google is attempting to preserve users’ privacy. However, there are usually some searches that show up. Use WordPress’s own Jet Pack Analytics; or Google Analytics for your webpage (Yahoo Analytics is a reasonable substitute for Google Analytics).

True story

Da puppy often shows pictures on the blog of people who ‘play’ various characters. One such character, Susan Cheshire, is ‘played’ by former Miss Ghana contestant Yvonne Nelson. Da puppy put up some pictures and wrote a lot about the character and called it a day.

That blog post is from August of 2012. There are still hits and searches for the beautiful Miss Nelson. But once I started to optimize for her name (by putting it together with the images), hits went up. That old blog post is now my most popular page, with over 40,000 impressions as the landing page (e. g. the first page people go to). These are all since the start of this calendar year. Wanna know what my budget was? 

$0.00. 

Learn your audience. Learn how they phrase their searches. Optimize your pages accordingly (for Yvonne Nelson, people were looking for her name but they were also looking for images. Hence I added her name as a tag and added more images of her). By the way, I can trace it all back to March 26, 2014. I worked to improve SEO. I changed a bunch of pages, not just the one. And suddenly everything took a quantum leap up. I added more tags and keywords. I added more images and captioned them better. It pays off, folks! 

The link is to Google’s own guide to SEO. The image is essentially a check list of everything you want to improve in order to improve SEO. The YouTube video is a basic explanation of what SEO is. And be sure to Google Yvonne Nelson. She really is beautiful.  

Did this chapter help you? Did it hold your interest? Do you want to see more? Then please vote! You know the puppy wants you to. ;)