Too many new business owners and Entrepreneurs, the term SEO (search engine optimization) sound a little intimidating. Some see it as a mysterious dark art, and can’t imagine how it works in principle.

In truth, most SEO is just common sense. The goal is simply to make your blog posts more findable by Google so that your content is shown to more people who are searching for it. In other words, you have optimized your blog for the search engine to find it.

These days, Google has made its rules simpler, so all we have to do is stick to some basics. Our title needs to reflect what the post is about. We need to use keywords, but only in a natural way. It also helps to write in a format that Google considers the most readable, and check your work for spelling, grammar, and accidental plagiarism.

Let’s walk through 6 simple SEO tips for brand-new Entrepreneurs. Anybody can do this, and no experience is needed.

1. Choosing A Better Title

Let’s begin at the very beginning, with your title. I know it can be tempting to get creative with your title, but in truth, the best titles are the simplest ones. You want to write your title as if you are answering a common question.

These are the titles that Google will consider appropriate search results to show a person who is searching, and so your post stands a chance of ranking higher on the results page.

For example, if the search query typed into Google was:

“How to feed my diabetic dog healthily?”

Then the best title you could write for a post that answers that question is something like:

“How to feed a diabetic dog a healthier diet.”

2. Using The Keyword In Your Body

Another way to let Google know that your post contains the answer to the search query is to repeat the keyword from your title, in the body of your text.

This works best in the first 150 words of the body of your blog post, so that should sit nicely in your introduction. In doing this, you are helping to confirm to Google that your post is about what it says in the title.

3. Using Keywords Naturally

Throughout the body of your blog post, you want to make sure you are using those relevant keywords, just in a gentle, natural way. There is no trickery here. This is just about remembering to refer back to the title and topic, staying on track, and keeping things relevant.

In our diabetic dog diet example, the keywords would be things like:

• Dog/dogs

• Dog’s diet

• Diabetic dogs

• Diabetic food for dogs

• Feeding your diabetic dog

• Improve diabetic dog’s health

Keep in mind the different variations of keywords that people might search for if they have the problem that your blog post can answer.

4. Writing A Readable Structure And Length

If you Google-search to find out what length your blog post should be, you will get a confusing variety of answers. In essence, this depends on your industry.

If you are writing very technical blog posts for the tech, medical, or finance industries, then you are aiming for 1000-2000 words. In the world of small business, entrepreneurship, e-commerce, and anything else fast-paced, most of us are too busy and distracted to read past 1000 words. However, based on the data chart below from the Hook Agency, content with a length of 2,450 words ranks the highest on Google currently. This does not mean every content piece for every industry should be that long but the longer your content is the better in Google’s eyes.

Consider how busy, or how available your average reader might be, and try to cater to them. A decent quality blog post is rarely less than 600 words, so aim there as a starting point.

But length is not the only factor to consider. To make a blog post readable, it needs to have structure, and it needs to flow.

Remember what your English teacher told you about essays – they need a beginning, a middle, and an end. It’s the same with a blog post. They need an introduction, the main body, and a brief summary at the end.

In the main body, try to keep your sections no longer than 300 words maximum, and separate the sections with a subheading. Paragraphs are shorter these days, so aim for no more than 3-4 sentences before starting a new paragraph.

Also, when people are reading on a mobile or a tablet, the text is smaller and pages are narrower, which makes paragraphs appear longer than they are. So reduce overwhelming the reader by breaking paragraphs up – the white space between the words is important for the reader.

5. Good Use Of Images

There are two key points to make about images; one being an SEO tip, and the other being a tip on making the most of your improved ranking.

When you have done the work and your posts are ranking better in the search results, don’t forget to take full advantage of your new business exposure. Your blog posts should always have your branding displayed on them, whether they are hosted on your own website, or on a third-party site like Medium.com.

Make sure you have your logo displayed. If you don’t yet have a logo you are proud of, then build a new one with a free tool like logocreator.io.

The SEO tip for images is to use the alt text feature, which is a tiny thing you might have missed until now. Most of the time you will use a free stock image to illustrate your blog post and to make it look more appealing.

Those images have the ability to be described to people with visual impairments, using a feature called alt text. When you upload your image to your blog post editor, click on the image once it has uploaded, and then select the alt text option.

Here you type in a really simple description of the image, trying to also use a keyword from your blog post. In our diabetic dog diet example, we have likely chosen an image of a dog eating. So your alt text maybe something like, “Dog eating healthy dog food.”

Remember to keep your alt text description simple, true to the image, and only use keywords naturally. It is worth doing this, as the Google search bots do read the alt text description from your images, so this can give your ranking an additional little boost.

6. Using Tools To Check Your Work

Finally, you want to be sure that your written work is of good quality, and isn’t too similar to anything else that’s already online. Although it is entirely possible to write something similar to another piece of work purely by accident, Google always sees this as plagiarism.

It can be worth investing in a plagiarism checking tool, just to make sure high similarity scores aren’t knocking your SEO ranking down. Grammarly and Quetext are both good options.

It is also worth proofreading a second time, using spell check, and perhaps using a grammar tool too, to make sure your work is of high quality. These are all things that Google takes into account when determining the quality of your content. This in turn affects the likelihood of your content ranking high in any search results.

Conclusion

So there you have it – 6 simple SEO tips that anybody can work with to improve their ranking.

As I hope you can see, this is mostly common sense. It is about writing good quality content that is relevant to people's needs. If you write a simple title that promises to answer a question, and then answer that question in the body of your text, you are off to a solid start.