What is the live assistant and what does it do for me?
It is what it sounds like. The live assistant is there to hold your hand if you so wish to. It is developed for the ones who are taking their first steps in the big, scary world of SEO.
It’s especially tailored to answer any questions you have and to reward you whenever you complete one of it’s tasks. When we say “reward” we aren’t referring to big chocolate cookies. Think smaller but still considerate. Like an achievement of sorts.
We have the main Live Assistant box sectioned in 3 main parts so it’s easier to follow the tasks. Each of the 3 main parts are divided in smaller tasks.
Domain
This one’s the simplest. You have one task on it. To make sure the keyword used for optimizing the article is different from the domain name. If you hover over the info sign it even tells you why. If you don’t know what a Penguin is you can check my detailed encyclopedia about Google animals.
The key to to the left signifies that this is an essential task. In the live assistant there are 3 essential tasks that you must complete, one for domain, one for title and lastly but not least content. In order to have the minimum amount of search engine optimization and not risk getting your site penalized by the aforementioned Google zoo pets. That is not to say that if you complete these tasks Google will be off your back, but that’s another lengthy subject that is just shortly presented in my encyclopedia.
Title
Just as the title hints at, this section is focusing on the title part of your post. Too much title? Well not really. There are only 4 tasks.
• Essential Task- Use the keywords in your Title
• In order to increase your chance of getting picked up by search engine crawlers keep your title short and to the point. But not too short. At least 10 characters.
• Keyword Density – Make sure you don’t overuse the keyword you choosed.
To define what keyword density is, i’m going to compare it to a scale. On the left side of the scale you’ve got normal words and on the right side you’ve got keywords. Now of course keywords weight more than normal words. So for every X amount of normal words you need Y amount of keywords. In order to have an acceptable keyword density you always need to keep the scale balanced.
• Make sure your title is different from your domain. Same rules that applies to keyword ≠domain applied to this as well.
Content
Squirrly is not categorized as a marketing tool just because all the other cool categories were taken. We help you achieve what we promised we’ll do. And last time i checked Content was still KING. We love content. It’s our nuts. It’s what we feed our squirrels with. It’s all about the content. And that’s why this category gets the whole nine yards. More specifically the 7 tasks i’ll be covering.
• Content loves keywords. What’s the point of keywords if you’re not going to use them. Make sure you include keywords in your content. Some might say “the more the merrier”. We’ve always loved going on the route of “spending them wisely”.
• Use keywords in your first sentence. Why is that? Google adds a short description to whatever you’re searching for. A snippet. It’s important to have your desired keyword there.
• Don’t be cheap with your words. In order for your article to get indexed in Google News having 80 or more characters is optimal. Also if people want short content they can always turn over to Twitter. Not much can be said in 140 characters but to each his own.
• Don’t be too charitable with your keywords. What I said earlier about keyword density in the title also applies in the content. The live assistant is keeping your balance in check so you don’t swing the wrong way.
• Put some paint on your keywords. By bolding important keywords you’re signaling crawlers what your content is about. Make sure you don’t use too much paint or crawlers might think you’re over-optimizing and send bad signals to search engines. All I have to say is “use this wisely”.
• It’s all in the heading. Headings are titles. Or sub-titles. In any way they are not a way to bold your text. Search engines use headings to figure out the structure of an article. Having them where they should be will signal a “Ok” message to search engines, i’d even go as far as to say they’ll be excited to see you learn something useful. Having them all over the place, using them to bold words, keywords, using too many of the same type of heading, etc, will signal a “Nay” to search engines and that’s when the down-ranking starts. Heading are good for you but like anything else in life you need to make moderate use of them.
• A picture’s worth a thousand words. By that logic adding a picture just cost you 1000 words worth of content. That’s not really a cost as much as it’s a huge advantage. How huge? King James version of the bible has 787.137 words in it. That’s 787 pictures worth of content. To put that into context a National Geographic photographer is going through around 1400 frames for a photo of theirs to get published in the magazine. That’s double the bible. Where am I going with this? I don’t know, maybe the pope? The point of the matter is that images are good for your content. Search engines appreciate them but even more the people that actually read your articles. Using the keywords when writing the image’s description in it’s alt tag also makes search engines love you.
This pretty much sums up todays walkthrough Squirrly LIVE assistant.
And remember, Google loves your content clean and original.
