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Good Reads SEO Plan: How to Get YOUR Site Ranking

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Good Reads is, without a doubt, one of the most popular and recognizable online community for book lovers. Their brand recognition and SEO results is something many small and medium businesses can only envy.

You may not have been in the business for a long time just like Good Reads. But, it’s important to remember that their huge success started from humble beginnings. Since inception, back in 2007, Good Reads has focused on implementing a stellar SEO strategy, and that has helped them improve their site ranking. The good news is that their SEO plan can work for you too.

Improve your Website Usability to Improve SEO

Search engines like Google reward sites that demonstrate better user engagement. Websites that have high usability make it easy for visitors/users to view more pages, stay on your site longer, and make more repeat visits. This, in turn, improves site ranking.

Website usability is one thing that has been working in favor of Good Reads. The platform makes it possible for book lovers to review books, share recommendations, and track reading history and goals. Even better, its web design facilitates reader interactions with authors through profile information, interviews, giveaways, and authors’ blogs. As a result, the book review and recommendation platform has attracted over 90 million members.

Updating Content Regularly

Search engines favor sites that update their content often. Regularly updated content is viewed as one of the best indicators of a site’s relevancy, and that’s one of the things that work for Good Reads. The book review platform itself publishes dozens of “best of” lists across several categories. Better yet, there’s an endless number of reading lists being posted daily by members.

Encourage Sharing On Social Media 

Every business with a website needs to have an active social media presence. That’s pretty much common knowledge. What most people don’t know is that making it easy for site users to share your content can improve your site ranking.

Good Reads is quite effective in this search engine optimization strategy. They include social sharing icons on all their content. On top of that, they also share links on their social media pages. With more than 1 million users on Facebook alone, Good Reads can encourage social sharing as a regular part of their SEO campaigns.

Mobile Optimization Improves SEO

Today, the use of mobile devices is on the rise. In fact, more than 60 percent of searches on Google come from mobile devices. Google takes mobile optimization seriously and ranks sites accordingly. The search engine penalizes websites that are not mobile optimized by bumping down their ranking.

Obviously, Good Reads recognizes this and has a mobile-friendly website design in place. Their app is available for android and iOS systems. In the same way, you need to test your site and make sure your website is mobile optimized. If it isn’t, it’ll affect the user experience, adversely affecting your ranking.

Have a Link-Worthy Site

Good Reads focuses on creating relevant links within the text. They understand that anchor text like “Click here” has no site ranking value beyond the attached URL. In their place, they write out the name of a book or page. This helps improve their search engine rankings as well as the ranking of the page/book they are linking to.

Similarly, you can use descriptive links by linking keywords. Doing this will not only improve SEO but also add value to your readers, including those who are using screen readers or with disabilities.

Need Help with SEO Ranking?

If you’re just getting started on your online business, and not sure what is SEO, the team at Web Content Development can help. Give us a call to learn more about our services.

The Best SEO Basics for Web Content Writing

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A primary purpose for having a website is to inform potential public about your products or services.  However, unless these individuals know or guess your exact web address, they will have to rely on SEO to show them the way.  This means that your web content will need to be carefully written.

SEO Basics

Simply establishing a website that discusses your business’ products or services does not automatically guarantee you will have the traffic you need to achieve success.  Following are five SEO basics you need to know about web content writing:

1. Choose the proper keywords.

These words and short phrases describe the main topics on your website and give readers a good picture of what your products or services are.  However, if you use keywords that draw people to your website but don’t correctly convey what your products or services are, you will not keep these individuals on your website.  For example, if you use keywords like “ballet clothing” when in fact you specialize in making personalized ballet outfits for infants, you may have a lot of clicks onto your website–only to lose a lot of frustrated individuals who were looking for adult ballet clothing.

2. Use keywords in your content titles and headings. 

When an individual enters these words into a search engine, the search engine may recognize that your website addresses that topic, and it, therefore may show your website near the top of its search results.

3. Use keywords liberally but correctly throughout your content itself. 

Using your keyword as often as possible throughout your content may not serve to improve your SEO at all, and in fact, may damage it.  Users may be interested in content that matches their query, but not if this content has no real value and is essentially only loaded with keywords.

4. Ensure content is professional and well-written. 

Content should always be written in a way that is appealing and interesting, properly titled and professional.  Content that contains grammatical or spelling errors may not only fail to come up in keyword searches, it can affect how the user thinks about the website.

5. Provide content that readers will find engaging and valuable. 

Once an individual makes it to your website, your content determines whether or not they stay. Readers love to have easy answers to common questions, and tips that help them to improve their life in some way.

What most businesses don’t realize is basics are key. There can be no expansion or optimal results without keeping the basics in, even on your website. In this technological world, SEO and content come hand-in-hand to give you the traffic you need to build your business to a booming enterprise. With everything found on the web now, your content helps you stick out from the repetitive crowd. Know what to do by applying these steps and watch as your web traffic increases and the relevancy of your content reveals the consumers you want.