There are countless articles written about SEO every day. But most of them cover the same two topics: keywords and word count. However, there are some other key things to consider that have nearly just as much impact on your ranking. Here’s what you might not know about SEO:

1. Use image alt attributes to let search engines understand what a picture is about.
2. Write in an easy to understand way, just like you would talk.
3. Set the heading types so search engines know how your page is structured.
4. Configure the metadata to provide the most useful snipped of the page’s content.

Alt Image Attributes

Most people never bother to set up the alt text on their images. When you leave it blank, search engines don’t know what the image is, so they consider it a decorative item. This is a shame because you could be benefitting from valuable SEO juice by just setting an alt text. You need to describe what’s in the image, but that doesn’t mean it can’t contain your keywords. Think alt text like, “photo of a woman using our app to save money on car insurance.” If “save money on car insurance” is your longtail keyword, this is a great way to get more references in.

Conversational Tone

If you want to try for ‘position zero’ which usually gets read out by voice assistants and appears at the very top of google search results, you need to do a few things. One of the most important ones is to write in a conversational tone. That means, write as if you’re talking to someone. Answer the question (related to your longtail keyword) as naturally as possible in 40-60 words. And don’t keyword stuff, Google has software to recognise this now. Maybe you could add a few questions? Or start sentences in ‘grammatically-unconventional’ ways. Oh, and don’t use too many big words. 

Heading formats

Another key to position zero is to use proper heading formats (especially with lists). Google needs to know how to display your content. So, only ever have one H1 heading as a first point. When you make an expanded list, put a one-sentence overview next to each point and set it as an H3 or H4. This tells Google that it can show those list headings to answer peoples questions, even if there is more information in between the points. Or you can provide an overview of what you’re going to talk about at the top of the article with your website editor’s in-built ‘list’ format like we’ve done here.

Metadata

Use Yoast or another plugin to quickly configure your page’s metadata. This helps search engines know what your page is about. It also provides a customised ‘overview’ snippet about the content. You’ll get a better click-through rate if you make it clear right away how you’ll answer a visitor’s question. Remember you should use a long-tail keyword in most instances. Your site can get dinged for having pages with duplicate ‘seeming’ content. So, longtails let you add that differentiation.

That’s our list of what you might not know about SEO. Hopefully, that helped you with some tips you can use right away. Need more? Check out our previous article on SEO.