GeekFamily On-Page SEO Guide

Guide Prepared by Jules Sherred (@jules) and Karen Walsh (@karenwalsh)

Download the complete PDF of this guide for quick reference. The guide will be updated as new tips for specific columns are added. The download link will never change.

Use Headings – They’re Your Table of Contents

Combating Reader Fatigue and Helping Readers Parse the Text

The H1 Exception: Recipes That Contain Multiples

Keywords and Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)

Google Likes It When You Update Posts

Tools Available to the Writers to Help Them “Reverse Engineer”

Introduction

As writers, we often think about our audience in terms of topic and tone. However, for a blog, thinking in terms of format and how people find your writing is also important. This means that we need to put ourselves in the shoes of our readers when we’re writing. In some ways, this is easy. They’re geeks and parents, so like a lot of what we do.

When thinking about format and word choices this might be a little more difficult. Sometimes, you’re going to want to try to think like the reader from a “how did I find this?” perspective. Sometimes you’re going to want to think about this from the “how do I read this?” perspective.

What Is SEO?

SEO means “search engine optimization” which basically just means maximizing the way your writing responds to searches from Google. The better we do this; the more people will find our posts when they do searches.

This guide will be focusing on “on-page SEO” which follows the rules that “Content is King” and “Great formatting makes for happy readers which makes for a happy Google.” Google rewards individual posts based on several criteria, including user experience. If two posts answered a searcher’s questions equally, but one post was formatted better than the other, the better formatted post would rank higher in SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

How does Google determine this? There are seven key ways that Google determines competitive SERP:

It looks at headings to see if the post is chunked up according to topics or themes.
It looks at time spent on page.
It looks at proximity of words and subjects and how they relate to each other.
It looks for overuse of a keywords which makes for boring reading.
It looks at searcher’s intent.
It looks at the length of posts. The longer the post, the better. This is part of “content is king.” The sweet spot is a minimum 2000 words. But even posts with over 1000 words will do better because they are rich in information. Going over 2000 words is never bad. For reviews, think pieces, and other information-rich posts, be as detailed as possible without simply writing to fill a quota or worrying about going over. Write exactly how many words need to be written to say what you need to say, and don’t worry about having to go back and cut words because you think it’s too long. It really isn’t, if you’re using headings properly. Words should only be cut if the flow isn’t logical, things are redundant, or sections need to be rearranged.
It uses signals based on behavioral and cognitive psychology about how brains consume and process information.

If you have a post that is in the top 10 results and another post comes along that is equal in providing information about what the searcher is looking for but is better formatted, that new post will rank higher than your post, which will result in lowering your SERP ranking.

The Importance of Keywords

Keywords are one step to writing well for SEO. The first step is good content that answers specific queries. The second step is making sure those queries or variation of those queries are found within your article. When you’re writing your article, you want to think, “If someone was searching for this using Google, what words would they use to try and find the answer?”

Things like reviews are easy for keyword choice since you’re using the item in the title and article, along with the word review. You don’t always have to include the word “review” in the title if it’s near the beginning of the first paragraph, in the excerpt, and in the meta description that you enter into Yoast. That said, also including the word “review” in the title gives some extra points. It also helps to increase CTAs (click-through-rate) in SERP and on social media because it makes the subject matter obvious. As a note, Google will also pick other parts of your post, parts that are not your meta description, as the SERP description when that section of your post better answers a search query.

Things like the bigger think pieces may feel as though they can’t fit into a keyword without compromising voice. However, it just means thinking a little bit more about what you’re writing so you can focus it. If you think about your bigger think pieces as a novel, but instead of a three-sentence elevator pitch, you had to narrow it down to 3 – 5 words, it may help. The keywords should always answer, “What is this article about?” as specifically as possible.

A Few Guidelines to Keywords

They should be short phrases (long tail keywords), and never a single word (short tail keyword) unless that single word is a proper title. But even in the case of proper titles, you want to be specific because you’ll be competing against a vast range of articles. If the topic is something obvious, try to focus the niche of your piece.

Example:

“Wonder Woman” = Meh. Search “Wonder Woman”. You’ll see the first results are mostly reference sites and you’ll never compete with that.
“Wonder Woman’s agency” = good

That additional word would be something for which people might search. This helps the search engine find your article more easily.

Questions to ask yourself when choosing a keyword:
1. If I wanted this piece to answer a question, what would it be?
2. If I was looking specifically for my article, how would I go about searching for it?
3. If I was typing a phrase into Google that summed up my article, what would it be?
You should never use the same keywords for more than one article. If you use the same keywords across articles, you’re not only competing against other sites but also with yourself.
Enter your keywords into search. Do the results match the type of thing you’re trying to rank for?
You don’t want the keywords to be the title of a column series. People would have to first be aware that the column exists to use that term. Your column is about something specific with a new theme each week (in most cases). The keyword should be built around that theme, so when people search it, they then become aware of your series. (Specific example found in the Stack Overflow guide.)

Once you’ve decided on your keywords, work that into your title and the first paragraph, the closer to the beginning the better. Then, you should include it in at least one heading, in the alt tag of at least one image, and a few times in your article. Yoast will tell you if you’ve included it too many times (aka “keyword stuffing” which Google penalizes for) or if you could use it one or two more times. A simple way to work in those extra uses without compromising the voice of your article is through image captions.

Four uses of your primary keywords per 800 words is good if you also have good LSI words (more on that below), even if Yoast tells you otherwise. Programming for LSI reading is complicated and nuanced, especially when Google updates its algorithms every week as the deep machine learning becomes better, so Yoast doesn’t measure for those things. It just measures for the very basics.

If you do not have good primary keywords, Google will decide what your post is about. Even if you do have good primary keywords but there are a lot of competing topics in your article, Google will also decide about what your article is about.

When you enter your primary long tail keyword (the focus keyword) into Yoast, it creates a special meta tag for it. If Google can’t figure out how your article relates to it, then it will pick something else. You may think this is Google telling you how to write or what is cool, but it’s about making sure the content they serve to searchers is truly the content being looked for.

To continue with our Wonder Woman example: If you say your post is about “Wonder Woman’s agency” but mentions Superman more, then that post is about Superman and not Wonder Woman. Sure, you could mention Superman, but it should only be in passing. Google also does this as another measure to prevent keyword stuffing. Once upon a time, if you mentioned X so many times, or hid the keyword in code, and your article was not at all related, it would rank for that bogus keyword, making the searcher very unhappy. How would you like it if you were looking for articles on Wonder Woman’s agency but instead got an article about how Superman is superior to Wonder Woman, thanks to the manipulation of keywords?

Picking focused keywords will help you to focus your writing. Sometimes, it will result in re-organizing your article, but that’s okay. Focused writing makes for engaged readers.

Use Headings – They’re Your Table of Contents

What are headings? Headings are formatting tools that tell readers and, consequently, Google what the next section is about. Bold and italic words help to signal importance of certain words. Headings give a greater signal and signals the content is formatted for pleasurable reading. As a result, when writing, you need to make sure to not just bold the words, but to also use the heading tags. If you’ve been using bold text to signify sections, switch it to a heading.

Headings also help with reader fatigue and help readers quickly scan an article for relevant-to-them content. Most people scan websites as opposed to deep reading them. They start at the top, read the first paragraph, and then scroll all the way down to the bottom, as their brain reads for headings. If they can find relevant information in the headings, then they are more likely to read word-for-word. Because the internet has so much information, people have adapted by skimming to quickly weed out the “white noise.” If an article is too dense, people automatically skip it and find something easier. It’s not dissimilar to how we scan rules books to find the content we want to know in that moment of gameplay.

There is also a hierarchy to heading tags and it works in the same way as if you were to generate a Table of Contents in Word and how Table of Contents work in offline publishing.

Adding Headings in WordPress

First, you need to set your WP to show the dropdown menu. This means that you need to click on:

Turn on the toolbar toggle. That will give you the second row of formatting options that look like this (if you already see these, ignore the toolbar toggle discussion above):

Your title is automatically a Heading 1. Do not use this as it will compete with the title for relevance. There is one exception to this, which will be explained below.

Combating Reader Fatigue and Helping Readers Parse the Text

Heading 2 and Heading 3 are going to help you most. Research shows that people read using their mobile devices. This means that big large banks of text overwhelm them. It’s not that readers are lazy or not intelligent, it’s that their brains can’t easily parse large blocks of text.

It’s why e-readers use small blocks of text per page. It’s why book publishers format books to include a maximum number of words per page. It’s also why textbooks and other academic material breaks things up on a page. It’s why instruction manuals or rules books are formatted the way they are.

It’s kind of like the way we break up telephone numbers into blocks to make things easier to remember because people can’t easily remember more than 7 things in a series. What you’re doing is shifting your formatting to match the way your audience reads.

This is also the reason that you want to think about the length of your paragraphs. While we all think about the paragraph sandwich (topic sentence-evidence-explanation-conclusion), readers don’t care. They want to be able to see things easily. If you’ve got a long paragraph, see if there’s a way to organically split it up. Yes, it might kill your writer soul a bit. But, it helps people want to read and stay engaged.

The Hierarchy of Headings

In addition, headings are part of the way that Google finds answers to questions. There is a hierarchy to headings. H1 is the main title. H2 can be thought of as subtitles or topics. H3 is subtopics of those topics. Google scans the doc to see how the text under a heading related to the heading and then as it relates to the heading higher up in the hierarchy. Hopefully the following image will help you to understand:

In the same way, creating appropriate headings brings people to your article and helps them decide if they want to read it.

Heading 2:

This is really the topic of the section. For nonfiction writers, this is basically your topic sentence shortened into a phrase. Moreover, that phrase should be a question, or be statements that start with words that typically begin a question, if possible. The reason for this is because when people search for things, they’re going to often use questions. When people see their question in a heading, they’re more likely to read.

Example:

Topic sentence of paragraph/section: In Wonder Woman, Diana’s agency allows her to not only make decisions but to be able to change her outlook after reflecting on things she sees.

Heading 2: Wonder Woman’s Agency in Decision Making and Changing Opinion

BETTER Heading 2: How Does Wonder Woman’s Agency Impact Her Decisions and Opinions?; or

How Wonder Woman’s Agency Impacts Her Decisions and Opinions

The question/sentence format also works for What/Why/When/Where, etc.

If you’re writing a personal piece, think of your article as a novel. Ask yourself: “If these 300 words was a chapter in my novel, what would I name it?” In these situations, try to use a heading that invokes the tone or sentiment of what’s to follow. This will allow you to pull the reader in via emotional hooks.

If you can answer that question or finish your thought (for think pieces) in 300 words or less? You’re rockin’ in the free world. HOWEVER, if you can’t? That’s when you use:

Heading 3:

Heading 3 is for when you have a lot to say and need to break it into smaller pieces. In this case, you would probably break “How Does Wonder Woman’s Agency Impact Her Decisions and Opinions” into two sections with Heading 3: “Agency and Decisions” and “Agency and Opinions”.

Again, all this is doing is helping your reader find the information they want more quickly.

The H1 Exception: Recipes That Contain Multiples

Creating an Engaging Title with the Focus Keyword

You are about to create a post with Wonder Woman-Themed Recipes. The focus keywords would be “wonder woman themed recipes”.

You don’t have to worry about punctuation in keywords. Google will strip them, anyway. And Yoast is going to yell at you because your title may have single quotes (which Google ignores) but your keywords omit those.

“Wonder Woman Themed Recipes” signals to Google that you are about to list several things of a type, which gives it extra value. To increase CTA, you’d want to include how many recipes are in the post. People love hard numbers. A great title that is both engaging and SEO-friendly would be: 10 Wonder Woman-Themed Recipes to Celebrate X.

In your opening paragraph, you’ll want to tell the readers not only how many recipes can be found overall, but also how many recipes are there for each meal grouping.

Organizing the Content Logically to Maximize SERP, Time on Page, and Return Visits

The next thing you would want to do is organize your recipes according to meals. This is where the H1 rule breaking comes in. You’ll only use H1 if you are grouping things according to meal-type. Each meal-grouping will have an H1 that includes a variation of the focus keyword:

H1: Wonder Woman-Themed Breakfast Recipes

H1: Wonder Woman-Themed Lunch Recipes

H1: Wonder Woman-Themed Dinner Recipes

Those H1 titles will be competing in SERP with the main title, but that is okay! You want your post to rank highly for both general themed recipes, and if someone says, “I want to throw a Wonder Woman themed dinner party” and then goes to Google and types “wonder woman themed dinner recipes”. DING! Google knows exactly where to find those recipes and when the searcher hits the page, they’ll be able to quickly find those recipes. It also has the effect of making the post bookmarkable for repeated reference.

Now, we need to include our recipes. First, we’ll start with breakfast.

H2: Recipe #1 – [Title]

H2: Recipe #2 – [Title]

H2: Recipe #3 – [Title]

We don’t need to include the keywords in the H2 because both Google and the reader will see that this recipe directly relates to breakfast recipes.

Next, we include the ingredients, and preparation and cooking. These would be H3 under each specific recipe.

H3: Ingredients

List Ingredients

H3: Preparation and Cooking

This would be done in steps. Each step should begin a new sentence and should be enumerated with Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, etc., in bold.

Step 1: Dice your onion and set aside.

Step 2: Cube your cheese and set aside.

In the end, your post is organized as following:

H1: MAIN TITLE

Opening Paragraph(s)

H1: WONDER WOMAN-THEMED BREAKFAST RECIPES

H2: RECIPE #1 – [TITLE]

Paragraph(s) MAYBE SOME BANTER ABOUT THE RECIPE

H3: INGREDIENTS

paragraph LIST

H3: PREP

paragraph METHOD WITH NUMBERED STEPS

H2: RECIPE #2 – [TITLE], REPEATING FORMAT

H1: WONDER WOMAN-THEMED LUNCH RECIPES

ETC.

And Yoast will scream that the headings aren’t using the focus keyword but Google will know. A plural is not different than singular regarding this, because it’s a list and outlines a clear table of contents in the same way that Word generates TOCs. And if you’re lucky enough, your recipe will be chosen as a featured snippet because Google knows exactly where to find that information and it is formatted in such a way that Google can easily grab: Recipe title, Ingredients, and Method.

Final Note: An effective way to check headings and whether they are logical and, therefore, helpful: Stick your post into a Word doc, click the References tab, and create a table of contents from the Table of Contents dropdown menu. If reading your headings gives you a good outline of what your article is about or, for personal pieces, the emotion of the article, then it will do the same for both the reader and Google.

Keywords and Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)

The little green SEO button that we all look for does a great job telling you if you’re used your keyword enough times, or too many times. However, the keyword may sound awkward when used throughout the post. You don’t want to sound as though you’re writing just the keyword over and over (aka “keyword stuffing”) but you do want it to show up in searches.

Think back to when you were learning to read and didn’t know a word. The teacher told you to look at the context to try to figure it out. LSI is the same premise only mathematical. It is a fancy way to talk about Google’s reading comprehension and how it is used to return search results.

The most common analogy is the word “apple.” Since the search engines don’t read capital letters, a search for Apple can be either the company or the fruit. This means that the words you choose to put in your post help create context that give the search engines a way to decide which “apple” you’re talking about.

The more people write articles about certain topics, the more Google is better able to understand common themes and how things relate to specific topics; the better its own reading comprehension becomes. Your well-written articles are also helping Google to learn, and to recognize keyword stuffing and squash that garbage.

Let’s go back to Superman and Wonder Woman. If 10 people wrote an article about Wonder Woman’s agency, Google looks to see what those articles have in common to better understand what that topic is truly about. If an article comes along claiming to be about that topic, but doesn’t include some of the common key phrases but instead includes common phrases that relate to a different topic, while stuffing the article with “Wonder Woman’s agency”, Google can now see right through that thanks to comparative analysis.

With longer keywords like we discussed above, search engines remove what they call the “stop words” (mostly all those words that don’t have meaning such as of, an, or, and, with, etc.). These additional terms called LSI keywords help readers and search engines focus the content better, and determine the true topic.

The website http://lsigraph.com is a great place to start looking for related search terms to help with your search. The “People also ask” and “searches related to” sections in SERP are based on part of the LSI technology.

For example:

Looking at these, there’s a bunch of different ways “Wonder Woman’s agency” can be categorized. Breaking these into categories, we have:

The recent movie:

wonder woman gal gadot

wonder woman movie 2017

cast of wonder woman 2017

Wonder woman movie trailer

Wonder woman full movie

The 1970’s show

Wonder woman 1975 cast

Original wonder woman actress

Wonder woman 1974

Television series references

Wonder woman full episodes

Wonder woman tv show 2016

Wonder woman season 3 episode 24

Because your article could be about the current movie, the original Lynda Carter show, or any television representation of Wonder Woman, you want to make sure that your article clearly offers context that can help the search engines focus on what keyword you mean.

In other words, if I’m writing a story about Wonder Woman’s agency in the original show? I need to include things like “original Wonder Woman actress” and “Lynda Carter”, the name of the network on which is aired, and the year 1974 or 1975, or both, and the word “television”. You could even just say “TV” because Google knows “TV” and “television” are the same thing. These will give the search engines the context of the original television series, while allowing you to not keep repeating the word “Wonder Woman”.

If you’re writing an article about Wonder Woman’s agency in the new movie, you want to use the year 2017, the studio, the director, the word “movie”, and Gal Gadot to create the right context.

You don’t need to say, “Wonder Woman 2017” if you were to say Wonder Woman and 2017 within the same sentence or within the same paragraph because Google looks at distance between words to figure out how they are relevant to each other, which allows for more natural writing.

Using the LSI graph from above but for the TV shows: If a sentence ended with Wonder Woman and the next sentence began with: The television show ran between 1975 – 1979. Some important episodes that highlight her agency include: Season 3 Episode 24 blah blah blah.

LSI will also determine that you are talking about Lynda Carter Wonder Woman and agency by figuring out that “episode 24” is related to “highlight agency” is related to “important” is related to “X years” is related to “Wonder Woman” which means we are talking about Lynda Carter, too, without even mentioning her name. Google’s deep machine learning’s reading comprehension works pretty much exactly like our own brains, that’s how sophisticated it’s gotten.

From our perspective, this also helps with bounce rates. If someone was searching for an article about the original Wonder Woman but they got to an article about the 2017 movie, they’d click the link and leave right away. Sure, there’d be a view, but it wouldn’t have value because they’d leave too quickly.

In the end, this is once more about thinking like the reader, “If I were someone who would be reading this, how would I be getting here?”

Internal Linking

Internal linking does a whole lot of different things that help promote a blog.

Ranking

Most importantly, we want to use internal linking to drive Google ranking. Links have value. Google likes pages that have links and sees them as authoritative. Internal links help make the website look more like an authority because you’re sending people to information you already have. Basically? Links are like money. They have value. If we want Google to think that we’re valuable, we need to make sure that our articles have lots of internal links. The more internal links we can fit into our articles, the more “money” we have and the more Google will want to reward us.

Keeps Readers Engaged

If you have people coming in from searches looking for something, the first thing you want to do is keep them interested in your site. This means making sure that you don’t just link externally, but internally. If someone comes in looking for “Wonder Woman’s agency,” the article might not be precisely what they’re looking for if you’re writing about the Lynda Carter show. However, an internal link to the “10 Things” article or the “Believe” review might be what they’re looking for but they didn’t know it was.

Linking to these articles will get them to click on them to see if the stories are something interesting and relevant. That keeps the reader on the website longer.

Anchor Text

When you’re doing internal links, you want to choose text that relates to the article to which you’re linking. This means that incorporating your LSI words with your internal linking, which can help add more value to those links. It’s not just about using the link, it’s about making sure you choose good words for the link. Make sure to think about how to use keywords, or derivatives of them, into sentences to send people to other articles.

Say you had an H2 section in your Wonder Woman’s agency post called “”What Families Can Talk About”. Our 10 Things WW would be a perfect thing to link to in that section. When linking to a 10 Things guide, you’d want to write something like, “If you have questions about whether the movie is appropriate for your children, read our Wonder Woman parental guide” with “Wonder Woman parental guide” linked. Distance between words also applies to anchor text. “Questions about wonder woman” will be highly associated with “Wonder Woman parental guide.”

One of our 10 Things guides’ natural LSI is “parental guide” because they tell parents what they should know about a specific movie or television show. Far too often, you’ll see anchor text that reads “here”. That signals to Google that you want that article to be associated with the word “here” instead of the topic. Our 10 Things posts have plenty of other natural LSIs. If you want to link to a specific post and would like keyword information on that post, then look at the “Tools Available” section in this guide.

Link to Popular Posts

If you know that a post is doing well in the first place, linking to it has value. It’s sort of like the “cool by association.” This means that linking to the 10 Things post for an article about “Wonder Woman’s agency” would boost both posts.

Google Likes It When You Update Posts

Google always wants to serve the freshest, best, and most relevant content to searchers. It’s how they make money. It’s never too late to go back to an old article and revamp the content, including formatting, to make it friendly to readers and give them the latest information on a topic. Don’t change the publish date because that will change the permalink and you’ll lose any SERP juice you’ve already built.

When you update an article, the “last updated’ information is sent to the site map so that Google knows to recrawl and re-index it. If you want to signal to readers that the content has been recently updated and includes the latest and best information then, at the top of the article, add “Last updated on [M/D/YYYY]” in bold. On the new site build, we will include a plugin that does this automatically.

Guides for Specific Columns

Stack Overflow

The first thing about these columns is that they’ll never rank for “Stack Overflow” because “Stack Overflow” already exists as something very specific. It’s a clever title, but can’t compete with the coding community.

These round-ups face a hurdle because, historically, the titles have been cute-informative instead of more on-the-nose-informative. To get these articles to rank, then a couple of things would need to happen.

Include the number of books in the title;
Include the theme in the title.

The theme is what these books are about, not more broad things like “Star Wars” or “Space”. The writers are naturally aware of this because they put it in the excerpt. Including in the title will help with both SERP and CTA because it’s super informative and brains love lists.

To use a recent Stack Overflow posts as example:

Stack Overflow: Double Time would now be Stack Overflow: 6 Books About Space and Time Travel

Change [book title by author] in italic to H2.

Keyword would be “books about space and time travel”. Don’t worry about the stop word. In this case, “and” works like “+”. The first paragraph would only have to be re-worked slightly to include that difference. The reason for choosing “books about space and time travel” is there are other Stack Overflow posts about “books about time travel” and you don’t want to compete with yourself.

For these articles, the focus keywords should always be “books about [topic]”. Overtime, it will build GeekDad’s authority regarding book posts based on certain themes and compete with Goodreads and other sites that repeatedly come up in the top 10 results when you search “books about [topic]”.

Re-Spawn

This series is a tough nut to crack. The topic of this series is easy: This Week’s Video Game News or Video Game News This Week. However, if you enter either of those into search, you’re competing with long-established sites that are dedicated to video gaming.

This series has already started to use a date in the title, which is a good first step as a signal to the person who would be clicking through. The publish date already signals that to Google. If you search “This Week’s Video Game News” or “Video Game News This Week” it does show up in the “Top stories” section within 24 hours of being published, and will continue to show up in the top 10 when filtering search to “Past week”. The trick is to see if we can get this to stay on in the Top 10 results without having to rely on filtering by date.

Search term: This Weeks’ Video Game News

The SEO title has been changed from the Post title, which can lower the CTA because not everyone pays attention to the published time. When determining a site’s authority on any given topic, one signal Google uses for ranking is CTA.

Suggested Tile Changes:

Re-Spawn: Video Game News for Week X – Month Day to Month Day, Year

This would turn re-spawn-11 into: Re-Spawn: Video Game News for Week 26 – June 26 to July 2, 2017

Suggested Slug Changes:

Respawn-video-game-news-week-X

Suggested Keywords:

Video game news week X (Hopefully, Google’s LSI brain will associate Week X with specific dates, as it does if you search “what calendar week are we in”.)

Opening Paragraphs Suggestions:

Each week, the same opening sentence is being used and it’s causing the articles to compete against each other.

Welcome back to the latest edition of Re-Spawn where we share video game news that caught our eye between Date and Date/Year, and let you know what we’ve played recently.

Headings and Unordered Lists

Blizzard’s Latest/Xbox’s Latest/etc should all be H2.

Removed the Unordered lists and just have each of those news items as their own paragraphs. The multi-level unordered lists are difficult to read on mobile.

“Related GeekMom and GeekDad Video Game Review” should be an H2 that that precedes: “GeekMoms and GeekDads often write about video games. Here is a list of all the video gaming related articles from the blogs from this past week.” This unordered list works.

“Below are the video games etc” should be an H2. People’s names shouldn’t be part of an unordered list, but the games can stay as unordered list.

Yoast is going to scream about this because this formatting is more about taking advantage of LSI and searcher intent than it is about specific keywords. Don’t worry about it.

THIS ONE IS SOOOOOO HARD! We will have to monitor and tweak because of the nature of Re-Spawn being a news bulletin more than an article.

10 Things

This only major change to this series is that each question should be H2 instead of bold text. Also, include the movie title more often in the H2 questions. It doesn’t have to be every question, but it should be more than two at the top. Break up usage to spread out the use of the movie title in headings to every other heading or top-middle-last.

Adventures in Instapotting

See the Wonder Woman-Themed Recipes in the Headings section.

Tabletop (can be adapted for many review)

Click here for the Tabletop Review Template

How-Tos and Tutorials

Do a search for “How to build a pc”. You’ll see something like the following:

If you were to visit the post, you’d see there are paragraphs under each of those steps. Each of those steps are a Heading. Each part is also a Heading.

For How-Tos with multiple parts, each part would be an H2 and each step would be an H3, followed by the necessary paragraph for the step.

If your How-To doesn’t have multiple parts, then each step would be an H2, followed by the paragraph explanation.

If your How-To contains one-sentence steps that don’t require details explanation, then you would preface each step as following:

Step 1: One-sentence step.

Step 2: One-sentence step.

Etc.

When you’re not using unordered or ordered lists, it is important to make “Step 1”, “Step 2”, etc., bold to signal to Google that these sentences are direction.

Tools Available to the Writers to Help Them “Reverse Engineer”

If a post is among the most 1000 popular posts in the last 28 days, then Jules can download spreadsheets of all the search terms (that Google will allow us to have; they only give us a fraction) that led someone to a post, along with the post’s average ranking and click-through-rate.

Why is this helpful? Because you may be surprised about which topics Google has decided the post is relevant. This will help you to reverse engineer LSI if you can look at keywords and compare it to the post in question and see “Aha! I didn’t even use that string of words in the posts, but I see that word is within the same paragraph as another word and Google connected it to answer the search term!”

Sometimes these correlations may be One Word in one paragraph and Next Word in next paragraph, because Google’s extremely intelligent deep machine learning figured out they are highly related to each other and will give the information the searcher is looking for. Most often, you will find these words within the same sentence, or sentence-string because Google likes to bold those words in SERP.

If you’d like keyword information for any post in the top 1000 for the last 28 days, just tag @jules in #site on Slack.

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