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SEO Beyond Headlines:

Rank Higher In Google In 13 Easy Steps

Brett Knight, Forbes

Let’s get started. First off, I’d like to thank you all for joining us for this webinar. Last month, we covered how to optimize your headlines for Google. In today’s session, we’ll be talking about other ways to make your stories more appealing to Google. For those you who don’t know me, first of all, I’d like to say where have you been the last few weeks, and why weren’t you at the other webinars? But really, my name is Brett Knight, and I’m an assistant managing editor at Forbes. I’m joined today by Dayne Richards, who works on our audience development team and is our top SEO expert at Forbes — he’s the guy who tracks the changes to Google’s algorithm and what that means for our web traffic. Dayne and I are happy to address any of your SEO questions, so please stay on after the presentation, but please hold your questions until then; this is a long presentation, and we’re going to cover a lot of ground, so be patient. And before it gets asked, I’d like to remind everyone that today’s session will be recorded; the link to that recording and to this slideshow should be sent out later today.

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Introduction to SEO

SEO

= Search Engine Optimization = write a story that Google can read!

This is important! Optimizing your story for Google will help you rank higher in Google, which will translate to more readers.

You may have heard the term “SEO” tossed around without really understanding what it means. To start, you should understand that Google decides where a webpage appears in its search results based on an algorithm that considers a number of factors; articles that follow Google’s rules come up earlier in Google search results. Google never comes right out and says exactly what it’s looking for, but it drops hints, and through testing, we can figure out other stuff that works or doesn’t work. As far as the term “SEO” is concerned, the letters stand for “Search Engine Optimization,” and all that means is that we want to write our story in a way that fits what a search engine like Google is looking for—we want to make sure our story is tailored to Google’s requirements. Today we’ll be going over a number of things you can do to make sure Google likes your story and to give yourself the best chance of ranking highly in Google. Before we get into any specific techniques, though, I want to emphasize that this stuff is really important; these are guidelines you should be following, or at least considering, on every story you write, not just when the mood strikes you or you feel like you have extra time. There’s no magic bullet with traffic, and following these instructions isn’t going to guarantee that you have a hit story, but ignoring them will put you at a big disadvantage from the start. If you do follow the directions and get your story ranking higher in Google, the results can be substantial. It’s hard to come up with solid data for some of this stuff, but Dayne ran some numbers and found that for Forbes stories, going from the third story in a Google search to the second yields a 70% jump in click-through rate, and going from second to first yields another 28% jump. So ranking higher means a lot more clicks.

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Introduction to SEO

More than half of Forbes.com’s traffic comes from Google!

As far as optimizing for Google, not everything is in your control—but enough is that you can really make a difference in where you’re ranking.

Another reason this is important is that over half of all the traffic to Forbes.com comes to us through a Google search. (The number used to be closer to 60%, Dayne tells me, but it’s still a little over 50%.) Compare that with social media, which accounts for just 11% of our sitewide traffic—Google is much more important, so we want to make sure we’re optimizing for Google. I would like to mention that there are some aspects of optimizing for Google that are important but are out of your control. That would be stuff like how long it takes a page on Forbes.com to load or how our site is structured or the metadata that our site uses. We have Forbes staffers constantly looking into how to improve in those areas, though, so you can trust that Dayne has your back and is trying to make sure your stories (and everything else on Forbes) are ranking as high as possible. All of that, there are a number of things that are within your control and can make a big difference in where you rank, so let’s dive into those.

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1. Don’t forget our headline tips!

Optimize the keywords. Think about what people are searching for. Use Google Trends for reference. Use those terms near the start of your headline if possible. Don’t overstuff your headlines!

Optimize the length: Keep the headline under 100 characters in virtually all cases, and stay under about 70 characters to avoid truncation and ensure the best results in Google.

Be specific: Don’t assume the reader knows you or knows what your story is about unless it’s made explicit in the headline.

Avoid euphemisms, nicknames and slang.

Your headline is a very important piece of optimizing your story for Google, and we covered this in detail in a webinar last month, so I don’t want to spend too much time on this, but here are a couple of tips as a quick refresher. Make sure you’re including the appropriate keywords in your headlines (meaning the words people are using to search for your story in Google). But don’t overdo it; if Google notices that you’re including keywords in your headlines that aren’t related or are only tangentially related to what your story is about, it can flag you for overstuffing and actually punish you in its rankings. So stick to the terms that are most relevant to your story. The second point here is to optimize the length of your headlines. Really long headlines are bad for Google, so always stay under 100 characters (meaning letters, numbers, spaces, punctuation marks—anything you type is a character). Be specific in your headlines and avoid euphemistic language. So if you’re writing an obituary, use the word “dies” rather than “passes away”; people are typing “dies” into their search bars, so that’s how your story is going to display best. If you missed our headlines webinar, I would highly encourage you to go back and watch it; we go into much more detail on these points, and there’s some other good advice, too! That recording is available online.

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(Still 1.) One new headline tip

Story URLs are important for Google. Write a good headline, and your URL should be good, too. Just make sure to get it right the first time!

Generally avoid accent marks in headlines to ensure your URLs are rendered correctly in Bertie. (But accent marks are fine to use in your body copy!)

I’m going to tack on one additional piece of advice with headlines in this presentation. URLs are the text you type in to go to a webpage (like here), and they are important for Google—it’s paying attention to the keywords in your URL as well as to what your headline says. At Forbes, Bertie does not allow contributors to directly modify their article URLs; the URLs are created based on the headline at the time of publication. However, as long as your headline is good—meaning it includes the right keywords and it’s the right length—your URL should be just fine. You’re not really missing out on much by not being able to modify your URLs. I’m just going to offer two words of warning here. First, be aware that your URL is being created based on the headline at the time of publication, so if you throw up a mediocre headline and then go back and improve it later on, your URL is permanently going to reflect that original mediocre headline. (So God forbid you misspell a name in your headline, your story is never going to rank that well in Google—the keyword is permanently misspelled in your URL as well. So make sure you proofread!) My other piece of advice is to avoid using accent marks in your headlines. Google itself has no problem reading accent marks—in Google’s eyes, an E and an É are the same letter—but Bertie can’t read accent marks when it’s generating your URL. If you have an accent mark, you’re going to end up with a missing letter in your URL, so your URL isn’t helping your Google ranking with that keyword. You can see that’s what happened with this Forbes story on Beyoncé; because we used the accent mark in the headline, the E is missing from the URL. Again, Google itself has no problem reading accent marks, so there’s no reason you should avoid them in your actual stories, in the body copy; just be careful about using them in headlines so you can optimize your URLs.

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2. Make good use of keywords in your story

“Keyword” = “search term” = what people are typing into Google that brings them to your story

“Target keyword” = the most important or relevant keyword for your article

The target keyword should appear near the top of your story. Use it in full on the first reference; don’t shorten or abbreviate it.

So we touched on keywords with headlines, but Google isn’t just looking for keywords in your headlines; it’s paying attention to the words you use in your body copy as well. To back up a second, let’s define “keywords”; basically, we’re just talking about the words readers are plugging into their Google searches that lead them to your story. Keywords are often going to be proper nouns: company names (like “Walmart”), people’s names (like “Elon Musk”) or location names or metonyms (like “Beijing” or “White House”). Sometimes they’ll be regular nouns (like the word “tech” or the term “free agency” for a sports story). The most important or most relevant keyword is known as the target keyword, and we should use that near the top of your story, ideally in the first paragraph. In that first mention, we want to use it in its full form. So if it’s a person’s name, we want to use the full name (first and last name) on the first reference. If it’s a basketball story, we want to use “Los Angeles Lakers” on first reference, not just “Lakers” alone or “Los Angeles” alone. Ideally, we keep using the keyword again throughout the story. That doesn’t mean we force the word in where it doesn’t belong, but Google pays attention to keyword density; if you’re using a word over and over, Google starts to understand that that word is what your story is about, so your story is going to rank higher for searches for that term. If there are multiple ways to render a particular term or concept, we want to use all of them in a story. So in that Los Angeles Lakers example, after we use the full name “Los Angeles Lakers” on the first reference, on later mentions we want to basically alternate between using “Los Angeles” and “Lakers.” Another example would be “coronavirus” and “Covid-19”—those words are different ways to render the same idea, so we want to try to use them both throughout the story so Google ranks your story highly for both terms.

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2. Make good use of keywords in your story

For the target keyword, use the most popular rendering.

Use Google Trends to figure out which version is most popular.

I mentioned that we want to include the target keyword near the top of your story. So if your story is primarily about Walmart, we ideally want the word “Walmart” in the first paragraph. If your story is primarily about a new White House policy, we want the words “President Donald Trump” in the first paragraph. But as I said, sometimes there are multiple ways to render a term—sometimes there are multiple ways to say the same thing. We want the first reference at the top of your story to use the most common or most popular version of that term. It might not be immediately clear which version to use. Maybe your story is about new MacBook laptops—is it best to use the word “Apple” or the word “Mac” on the first reference? Or to use a more relevant example at this moment, maybe you’re unsure whether to use “coronavirus” or “Covid-19” on first reference. In those cases, Google has a tool called Google Trends that will be really helpful.

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3. Use (don’t abuse) Bertie’s Keywords field

Make use of the Keywords field in Bertie to help Google figure out what your story is about, but don’t expect a huge ranking boost. Don’t stuff the field with unnecessary terms—only the most relevant terms, all of which should appear in your story. Generally stick to seven or fewer keywords.

So up until now, I’ve been using the word “keywords” to mean search terms—any relevant words that appear in your story and that people are going to be searching Google for. But Bertie also has a separate field labeled Keywords in the drop-down menu at the top-right of your article page. (You can see it here.) Filling out that field is an additional way to help Google understand what your story is about, and that’s going to help you rank on the appropriate searches. But there are a few caveats with this one. First, this field is sort of context for Google, and on its own it’s not going to give you a huge rankings boost; it’s more important to have the keywords actually included in your body copy, and then this will just supplement those uses. Second, in just about any area or SEO technique, Google is going to reward you only up to a certain point, and beyond that, it’s going to punish you for overdoing it—if it thinks you’re trying to game or rig the system, it’s going to drop you down in the rankings. This is one area where it’s really easy to overdo it, so you should be careful. In that Keywords field in Bertie, we want to include only the most relevant keywords—the ones that your story is primarily about, not just terms that are tangentially related—and that means that any word in that field should appear in your story. If the word is not in your story, it has no business appearing in that field. As a rule of thumb, try to stay below seven keywords in that field; if you’re going beyond seven, you may be in danger of overstuffing. Now, as you’ll see from the example here, a keyword is an independent thought but can be multiple words long. If I want to include “Super Bowl 54” as a keyword, I type “Super Bowl 54” as the keyword; I don’t type “Super” (enter), “Bowl” (enter), “54.” And as you’ll also notice in the example here, certain keywords may be rendered in multiple ways, and on a case-by-case basis, you may want to include both version of the same term. So here I have “Super Bowl 54” both with the number and with the Roman numeral. Another example would be “coronavirus” and “Covid-19”; if your story is focused on the pandemic, you will probably want to include both versions of that term. But never intentionally misspell a word. Some people may think “Warren Buffett” is spelled “Warren Buffet” and search for it that way, but we don’t want that misspelling to appear in this Keywords field.

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