First steps in simple SEO

Intuition is a marvellous thing. However, many people I’ve come across appear to have intuited that SEO, search engine optimisation, is somehow about optimising a search engine in an IT/engineering kind of way. I get it – I’m certain I make similar incorrect intuitions. What it’s really about is optimising content for search engines – to make content more discoverable and friendly to search engines and therefore more likely to be ranked highly in search results. And that matters because the vast majority of people will only look at one of the top few search results they get. So SEO is competitive too.

And it’s complicated and quite a skill that engages specialist professionals using data, tools and techniques you can’t just pick up in an instant. But don’t despair – there are a couple of simple things you can do – that very often people don’t do – that just might be the two most important bits of SEO to do.

I know for sure, because of the work I’ve done for many years in a range of contexts, that many, many people are not doing these two things that are (1) easy and (2) worth it if you want your work to be findable, get noticed and picked up, and so have a bigger chance of having the effect you probably wanted.

For one – give your work a straightforward title that properly represents what kind of content is to be found in it. “How to change a leaking tap washer” is a great example. Just consider how misleading many document titles are vs “How to change a leaking tap washer”. It’s really not clever to trick people into opening your document by promising something in the title that it doesn’t deliver. Personally speaking, I know there are situations where this advice might not be the best, but I’d chance it to say use the same simple text for both the title and file name, just in plain text with no decorations. Search engines are complicated, but they tend to pay special attention to document titles.

Second, fill in the file properties. Title will be there, and that’s the most important one. But you’ll also find other properties such as subject, keywords or tags, author name, organisation name, possibly a summary or comments text field. I often look at documents and over the years I can tell you it’s only a minority of times that I’ve seen work products’ file properties filled in. Again, all of this data that describes your document will be favoured by search as well as in other ways and are well worth the minute it takes to fill in.

There – I promised it was simple. We just have to do it.