Whether you publish a digital magazine or run an e-commerce website, getting attention for your business can be challenging. There’s so much noise out there that can drown out your content marketing efforts. This article provides you with a simple guide to landing more, better-targeted users through these simple Search Engine Optimization tactics.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is still a game of getting the user’s attention, as people continuously use search engines to find information that interest them the most. So despite content marketing tactics, online businesses have to employ the available tools to increase their chances of being found at the top of search results pages (SERP).
The higher, the better
There are various SEO techniques, however, what I am going to show you is the usage of properly crafted content on websites like Pinterest, Slideshare and the like. As a result, your digital publishing venture will be better visible for Google bots (pieces of code that crawl through the Internet) and more engaging for people who search those websites. If you know the basics of SEO, you can easily skip the paragraph below and proceed to the next one.
Lets start from SEO basics
When it comes to search engine optimization, website owners have control over the page title, page description and page headings.
The page title is indicated with an html title tag and communicates the topic of your page and what it is all about to both users and search engines. The title length should be no more than 60 characters, including spaces (Google will trim it above that number on SERP).
The page description is enclosed in the <meta name=”description” content=”Example description”> tag and it usually becomes the page’s snippet on the search results page. Even though the description does not influence the SEO itself, it influences people’s minds so it should be engaging and calling for action. You should avoid using descriptions longer than 156 characters.
Page heading sizes are enclosed in <h1>,<h2>,…<h6> tags, which structure the page’s content from the most important heading <h1> to the least important one <h6>.
The title stays at the top of the page’s anatomy and it is the very first thing on your site visible to Google (and many other search engines). A properly crafted title, coherent with the page’s content structured with headings, can highly influence its position on search results pages.
Google’s takeaways on Search Engine Optimization
- The <title> tag should be placed within the <head> tag of the HTML document.
- Ideally, you should create a unique title for each page on your site.
- Page title contents are displayed in search results. If your document appears in a search results page, the contents of the title tag will usually appear in the first line of the results.
- Words in the title are bolded if they appear in the user’s search query. This can help users recognize if the page is likely to be relevant to their search.
- The title for your homepage can list the name of your website/business and could include other bits of important information like (…) a few of its main focuses or offerings.
- Choose a title that effectively communicates the topic of the page’s content.
- Use brief, but descriptive titles.
- Titles can be both short and informative.
- Avoid using extremely lengthy titles that are unhelpful to users stuffing unneeded keywords in your title tags.
- A page’s description meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about.
- Description meta tags are important because Google might use them as snippets for your pages.
- Use heading tags to emphasize important text.
- Multiple heading sizes used in order create a hierarchical structure for your content, making it easier for users to navigate through the page.
The short summary above will help you understand why the page’s title, description and <h1>,<h2> tags are so important when it comes to search engine optimization. Of course, I didn’t elaborate on links and other related stuff, because it does not correspond with the topic of this article. If you want to know more about SEO, I encourage you to read MOZ’s beginners guide to SEO.
Profile pages, the landing pages approach
Pinterest, Slideshare, or almost any other specialized social network of this kind allows to create profile pages that, in fact, become your landing pages. And profile pages are no different from any other web page. Thanks to that, you can use the same SEO tactics you would use for any web page, i.e. fixing the page’s title and description, and placing content between heading tags.
What’s more, popular networks like Pinterest, Slideshare, About.me or Flavors.me keep a high page rank, are very popular and well-indexed by major search engines. Hence, the more well-optimized landing pages you have, the better, because it is more likely that your clients will find you through the organic search process.
Pinterest lets you find and save collections of images with all the things that inspire you and like-minded people.
The “Business name” field on your Pinterest page automatically becomes the <title> tag (which is the page name visible by Google) and the “About you” field becomes your page’s meta tag (that is visible to users searching the Web). The same field plays the role of the <h1> heading, so it is quite important to utilize those 156 characters of space wisely.
You may also link your Pinterest profile directly to your magazine app’s landing page or any other page of yours that will channel people’s attention.
About.me
This site gives the big picture of your online activity and helps create a beautiful homepage that inspires people to connect with you.
The “Name” of your about.me page becomes both the page’s title and the main <h1> heading. It is also used in the page’s meta description. The “Headline”, however, is moved to the secondary heading and also comprises the second part of the title.
Hint: Be aware that the “Name” and “Heading” fields are joined together to create the title tag, so they should not exceed 55 characters in total (including spaces).
Flavors.me
With Flavors, you can create a gorgeous free website in minutes, bringing together your social media updates, photos, videos and more, into a unified web presence.
The name of your Flavors page both becomes its title and is used as the <h1> heading content. The “About” section is placed in the meta description.
Use the About/Links section in the Flavors control panel to display key phrases linked to your external sites. You can link to your digital magazine’s website or the digital magazine’s landing page we created for you.
Hint: You can try to set your user name that is displayed in the page address to anything from your brand name to your strongest keywords phrase (e.g. life-style-magazine, music-magazine, digital-magazine etc.)
Slideshare
On Slideshare, you share what you know and love through presentations, infographics, documents and more.
The “Name” you set in general settings becomes a part of the page’s title sentence, so better keep it short and descriptive. The Name is also used for the h1 heading. The same goes for the meta description which is a combination of the Name you set and Slideshare’s own text.
Hint: You will also set up an About field. This text will be used by Facebook while sharing your Slideshare page.
The more landing pages you create, the better, because people will be more likely to find your business while searching the Internet. And the better optimized your landing pages are for search engines, the better results you will see.
Pinterest and Slideshare, totally different sites with totally different profiles of users, are really exceptional because they operate on visual, highly engaging content people love to interact with.
If you want to promote your digital magazine that way, create pages on various networks and always link to your digital magazine’s website or the landing pages we created for your digital magazine app.
The above-described technique can be applied to any other profile page on almost every network that allows control over at least the title, description and/or heading content.