SEO Writing 101 Guide

“SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results” per Moz, which is the very first company that started an online-based subscription service for the SEO community.  

Google and other search engines have millions of factors to determine which webpage is suitable for your query; however, the most important aspect of SEO writing is that you create content for your audience, and search engines make algorithm updates to provide the best search engine result pages (SERPs) to users. Do you see the keyword here? SEO is all about people. You do not want to create content for search engines. 

At DZone, we embrace our community and its members. Let’s dig into more details about SEO writing. 

Keyword Research 

We recommend conducting keyword research to generate new ideas for your topics. SEO keyword research will give you clear insights, such as: 

• Monthly Search Volume: How many people search for the topic you are thinking of? 
• Keyword Difficulty: How difficult or competitive is it? 
• Types of Content: What kind of content format works best? Written content, video, or infographics? 
• Know Your Audience: Who will be your primary targeted audience? What do they want to know? 
• Trend Analysis: Is the topic trendy? Do more people search for it compared to last year? Is it an evergreen or seasonal topic? 

There are many things you need to know before you start creating a piece of content.  

On-Page SEO 

As this guide is specifically for our DZone contributors, we would like to show some tips for on-page SEO techniques. 

Content Length 

How long a content piece should be is depending on your type of content, but there is a big trend that long content wins in SEO. The ideal content length is 1,000-2,000 words. This length will also maximize opportunities for social share and Google is now able to index passages from a webpage called passage-based indexing, meaning Google can pick up a block or part of content for SERPs to satisfy each query. 

Understanding Headings 

If you are using a content management system (CMS), you most likely have an option for headings, and the headings are the place you can drop your primary keywords to attract visitors. Consider each heading: 

• H1: An H1 is a book title. Use one H1 on each webpage. 
• H2: H2s are chapters. Guide what you talk about for each part of your content 
• H3: H3s are sub-chapters. If you need more details under an H2, this heading is your option. 

SEO Titles and Meta Descriptions

SEO Titles: Search engines display around the first 50-60 characters, including site name. Make sure you include the primary keywords in a title tag and attract visitors such as "SEO Writing 101 for DZone Community - DZone Writers" (51 characters) for this article. If your title tag is too long, the title will end with '...' which doesn't provide good information to users. 

You might be confused between an SEO title and H1, but an SEO title will show up on SERPs and an H1 will show up on an actual webpage. In many cases, you can use your H1 as your SEO title, but keep in mind that an SEO title has much potential to increase CTRs from search engines. 

Here are some great examples from our contributors:

"Being VP Of Engineering Is Harder Than Being CEO - DZone Agile"

"How to Convert HTML Tables into Beautiful PDFs - DZone Web Dev"

Meta descriptions: Search engines display around the first 150 characters. A recent SEO study shows that a meta description has more potential to increase CTR than a title tag. Again, make sure you add your primary keywords to attract users to click your webpage through SERPs. 

For this article, the meta description reads, "Whether you are thinking to join the DZone community or you are already a DZone Core member, this guide will help you create an SEO-friendly article."

Understanding Search Intent 

One of Backlinko’s articles states, “Search Intent (also known as “User Intent”) is the main goal a user has when typing a query into a search engine. Common types of Search Intent include informational, commercial, navigational and transactional.” 

The primary search intent for DZone is informational and navigational: 

Informational: 

Users who are looking for information will be categorized into this group. Our community members are looking for new ways to improve their programming skills, new applications or technical decisions. “How to” or “Tips of” are good words to use when you provide information that satisfies informational intent. 

Navigational: 

As we provide great resources to our community, we see people search for ‘xyz dzone’ on Google. This means users have specific questions about certain topics and they want to get the information from the DZone community. Understanding navigational intent will give you a new idea such as what kind of topics we are missing, and if there are any missing topics, it is a great opportunity to contribute your article to DZone. 

How to Contribute Content to DZone 

At DZone, we are passionate about helping the DZone community and sustain DZone members’ growth. If you are motivated to share your knowledge and expertise with the world, all you need to do is create a free account and click on the “Post” button in the top right of the navigation bar once logged in. If you have any questions about DZone contributors, visit our FAQ article for more details. 

Sources: https://dzone.com/articles/seo-writing-101-guide-1

SEO: White hat Vs. Black hat SEO Techniques.

SEO Practices are divided into two types:

• White Hat Techniques
• Black Hat Techniques

White Hat Techniques:
are the techniques that are recommended by search engines, to enhance the quality of the website traffic by using good practice techniques in design and developmentand to make the website more appealing to visitors.

Usually, in white hat techniques the SEO aspects are involved in every step through the way from analysis to the development passing by designing, hosting, domain name selection and promotion.

SEO Activities:

• Review of your site content or structure.
• Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages.
• Content development.
• content enhancing.
• Management of online business development campaigns.
• Keyword research.
• SEO training.
• Expertise in specific markets and geographies.
• organic natural web design and development.
• fixing content.

BTW: Abiding to the W3C Design Guidelines is not an answer to your SEO issues, But of course abiding to the W3c standards will not hold back your SEO activities on the contrary it will enhance your site from within.

the most important W3C standard that concern content is the accessibility guidelines.

Black Hat Techniques (spamdexing):

black hat techniques are more concerned with spamming or fooling the search engine indexing algorithms by studying the algorithms' methodology and use these knowledge to cram the black hat site in search engines in a process called spamdexing.

The earliest known reference to the term spamdexing is by Eric Convey in his article "Porn sneaks way back on Web," The Boston Herald, May 22, 1996, where he said:

The problem arises when site operators load their Web pages with hundreds of extraneous terms so search engines will list them among legitimate addresses. The process is called "spamdexing," a combination of spamming — the Internet term for sending users unsolicited information — and "indexing."

Common spamdexing techniques can be classified into two broad classes: content spam (or term spam) and link spam.

Content Spam:

• Keyword stuffing: it is the stuffing of keywords deliberately in the pages whether hidden or visible to make the page appear to search engine crawler as legitimate page for the chosen keywords, this technique manipulates the older indexing algorithms which were built for counting the wordings in the page to determine the density of a given web page and upon the counting the rank is determined.
  
• Hidden or invisible for unrelated texts: usually, by tiny texts, background colored texts, off-margin DIV tags, zero-height zero-width DIV tags Or using No script Section, No Frame Section.
  
• Meta tag stuffing: using the meta tags to stuff keywords that are unrelated to the site content.
• Gateway Or Doorway pages: Creating low-quality web pages that contain very little content but are instead stuffed with very similar keywords and phrases. They are designed to rank highly within the search results, but serve no purpose to visitors looking for information.
• Scraper sites: are websites built using programs that scrape data Or wordings from various websites or search engines and pack these search words together in a website, this type of websites is also called "built for Adsense" as the name suggests the website usually contains Adsense Ads that are integrated within the site content.
  

Link spam: takes advantage of link-based ranking algorithms, such as Google's PageRank algorithm, which gives a higher ranking to a website the more other highly ranked websites link to it.

• Link farms: Creating a close network of links within separated pages.
  
• Hidden links: Putting links where they won't be seen in order to increase link popularity. Highlighted link text can help rank a webpage higher for matching that phrase.
• Sybil attack: This is the forging of multiple identities for malicious intent. A spammer may create multiple web sites at different domain names that all link to each other, such as fake blogs known as spam blogs.
• Spam blogs: Spam blogs, also known as splogs, are fake blogs created solely for spamming, by redirecting users by links to the main spamdexed site, They are similar in nature to link farms.
• page hijacking: This is achieved by creating a rogue copy of a popular website which shows contents similar to the original to a web crawler but redirects web surfers to unrelated or malicious websites, this considered more like phishing than page hijacking as SEO Technique, yet phishing is going further in scamming the visitors in a cyber crime. page hijacking is considered a type of cloaking.
  
• buying expired domains: Some link spammers monitor DNS records for domains that will expire soon, then buy them when they expire and replace the pages with links to their pages. Now Google resets the link data on expired domains, which is somewhat important aspect to take care if you are a fellow webmaster, Rule1: don't let your Domain Name Expire.
• Cookie stuffing: This involves placing an affiliate tracking cookie on a website visitor's computer without their knowledge, which will then generate revenue for the person doing the cookie stuffing. This not only generates fraudulent affiliate sales, but also has the potential to overwrite other affiliates' cookies, essentially stealing their legitimately earned commissions, this earnings are realized when a user is registered to the business website.

Using world-writable pages

• Spam in blogs: This is the placing or solicitation of links randomly on other sites, usually blog comments, guestbooks and forums.
  
• Comment spam: is a form of link spam that has arisen in web pages that allow dynamic user editing such as wikis, blogs, and guestbooks. and it is similar to the spam in blogs
  
• Wiki spam: Using the open edit-ability of wiki systems to place links from the wiki site to the spam site. The subject of the spam site is often unrelated to the wiki page where the link is added, and this technique is also called Vandalis.
• Referrer log spamming: referrer-log spam may be used to increase the search engine rankings of the spammer's sites, by getting the referrer logs of many sites to link to them.By having a robot randomly access many sites enough times, with a message or specific address given as the referrer, that message or Internet address then appears in the referrer log of those sites that have referrer logs.

Other types of spamdexing

• Mirror websites: Hosting of multiple websites all with conceptually similar content but using different URLs. Some search engines give a higher rank to results where the keyword searched for appears in the URL.
• URL redirecting: Taking the user to another page without his or her intervention, e.g., using META refresh tags, Flash, JavaScript, Java or Server side redirects
• Cloaking: Cloaking refers to any of several means to serve a page to the search-engine spider that is different from that seen by human users. It can be an attempt to mislead search engines regarding the content on a particular web site. Cloaking, however, can also be used to ethically increase accessibility of a site to users with disabilities or provide human users with content that search engines aren't able to process or parse. It is also used to deliver content based on a user's location; Google itself uses IP delivery, a form of cloaking, to deliver results. Another form of cloaking is code swapping, i.e., optimizing a page for top ranking and then swapping another page in its place once a top ranking is achieved.

Finally, According to W3 Consortium that site design guides for accessibility will eventually clash with the SEO Good practices, That means that complying with any of the guidelines or practice will conflict with the other's guidelines and good practices.

SEO: Introduction

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process to improve the volume (number of visitors) and the Quality (type of visits, duration of each visit, type of information requested or fulfilling a marketing target) of a website from the traffic referred by search engines via natural (organic, Algorithmic) search results for targeted, relevant keywords.

To say an optimized website is to be the first in search engine results for the targeted keywords, by simply having the highest rank for that search subject.

The first site in search engines is the website that has the highest rank in the required keyword.

SEO is also applicable to many other types of data, like images, videos, local searches and industry specific vertical search.

As a matter of fact, search engine algorithms get changing all the time, so instead of trying to fool the algorithms, it is considered a better practice to concentrate on building an Effective SEO strategy targeting the website potential users.

An Effective SEO strategy will typically include:

1. How search engine algorithms work?
2. what are your prospect clients looking for regarding your Industry?
3. What is the subject for your website?
4. Building a website with a professional content.
5. Find the prospect visitors to your website.
6. Spread the word.

In short SEO is increasing a site relevancy to prospect and existing visitors.

SEO is better to be integrated with the early steps of your website developing, since SEO involve:

• site coding

• presentation of the core product

• structure of WebPages in an intuitive way

• Fixing programmatically errors that prevent search engines from getting the website from being crawled and indexed.