With SEO becoming more and more important in our everyday lives, taking time to sit down and learn the ins and outs of SEO may be daunting. Explaining SEO to a potential client who doesn’t understand it or trying to figure out how it works, without listening to long lectures and technical terms is even harder.

So let me help you out. Think of SEO as a massive closet that you have to sort out (bare with me). You have to channel your inner Marie Kondo and find the keywords that “sparks joy” in Google.

Take a look at your page, article, website—whatever it is your working on. What is it about? What describes your site and who are you trying to target? Let say you’re a beauty brand—great now Google “beauty.” Millions of searches will come up and in between all of those searches is your page.

If you have a hundred shirts and you need to find a specific one, you would definitely need some organization. You can hang it on hangers, separate it according to style, occasion, or color. Why? So that you can find the perfect shirt instantly.

Now think of Google as a massive closet. You want people to find you instantly between hundreds of similar brands. Well then, you will have to start organizing using keywords that people often search for and then defining those keywords into the specific brand you’re selling. This will help clients find you instantly.

So here is your cheat code to sort out your closet!

Heading

1. Headings should be less than 65 characters and more than 30 characters. 
2. Keep the heading straightforward and to the point. 
3. If the heading is too short (under 30 characters) it will be difficult for search engines to understand what the content is about and decrease your likelihood of ranking. 
4. Headings that have more than 65 characters risk losing part of their heading in the search results page.

URL

1. The length of the URL (slug) should not exceed 120 characters. 
2. Don’t overcomplicate your URL structure. 
3. Focus on using keywords that are relevant to the article. 
4. Your URL should only contain numbers, letters, and dashes. 
5. Avoid using these characters     ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) [ ] ? { } ; : “.,

Keywords

1. Add keywords that relate to the content of your article. 
2. There will be a list of keywords for each new article. 
3. Be sure to incorporate these into your article. 
4. DO NOT use keywords randomly. 
5. Be sure to check whether or not the keyword makes sense in the context you’re using it. 
6. If you need more keywords or would like to add extra keywords check out the general keyword list. 
7. You can use any of these words throughout your website if it fits. 

Article Length

1. When a page has a low word count Google can’t detect what the content is about. 
2. If Google doesn’t know what the content is about, it can’t rank your content for the search terms you are targeting. 
3. Each page should contain 2200 words.

Let me know what was your biggest challenges when starting out with SEO. What resources helped you and what is your favorite SEO tools to use? You can comment on this post or let me know on LinkedIn.