Search engine optimization (SEO) must be at the forefront of your thinking each time an article or blog post is written. Your SEO results can determine if your content will ever be seen. The vast majority of people don’t click past the first page of search results, so it’s not enough for your site to simply be indexed by Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Luckily for us in the radio industry, we can consistently broadcast our domain name and keep it in front of our listeners. But what about local news stories that people might be searching for?
6 Tips to Increase the SEO Results of your Articles
You want your station website to rank on the first page (which typically has 10 website listings). To do this, you need to employ these SEO strategies.
1. Add keywords to your website content: Keywords can be a single word or a short phrase of up to four or five words. These should be terms that are relevant to your pages and posts and which people are likely to use when they search Google.
Ensure that the chosen keywords are used within the page/post. Back in the day, some authors would overuse the keyword or hide it within the coding. Google realized this method of tricking bots to increase their website ranking, so now they penalize sites for doing this.
2. Use meta-tags to add more keyword: Meta-tags are hidden code — visitors to your website normally don’t see them, but the Google search engine “bots” that scan your site will pick them up. You can add these meta-tags as “alt tags” on each image and as page/post tags. This can be done within HTML editors or via the tag editor within WordPress.
3. Seek out backlinks, web pages that contain links back to your site: A big factor for search engines is quality organic backlinks. It’s what search engines are looking for. If you have multiple websites linking back to your website, Google gives your page higher credibility and search ranking.
4. Have content that is relevant to your station/listeners: Use articles or other material that is specific to the area you broadcast to. Google’s algorithm ranks sites with original, relevant content more highly than those with content repeated elsewhere.
5. Share the content headline via social: As mentioned above, Google rates content by relevancy so it’s important that more eyes see your content as soon as it’s published. Having lots of visitors to your content dictates that it’s relevant to them, so your score will increase. This affects your SEO results by pushing your content to the top for those searching for the same thing. be sure to share the headline with a call to view the entire article on your website.
6. Review the numbers/repeat: As you publish more and more articles on your website, watch the numbers to see what works for your audience. Publishing content for the sake of it, doesn’t help anyone and it won’t help your SEO results to have irrelevant content on your site. See what works with your audience and put efforts into publishing more content like that.
SEO Maintenance
Just like being at the top of ratings, SEO results should always be managed. As soon as you’ve climbed to page one ranking, your competitors will be after you with their own SEO strategies, seeking to knock you off the top. Or customers might start searching with different keywords.
The bottom line: Your website will need continual SEO review to maintain your search engine ranking. See what works and keep providing listeners with what they want.
