Many software developers are technical authors and share their content with the world in form of code, articles, blogs, and videos. I started writing and sharing my technical experience and source code with software community in 1999 and year 2000, I founded C# Corner. The purpose of the community was to provide a platform for software developer to learn, share, grow, and inspire others. Over the time, I’ve learned that if we developers can pay little bit attention to SEO, it can increase significant traffic on our content. In this post, I will share my top ten tips for technical writers that may help boost your SEO ranking and hence get more traffic to your content.
Here are top 10 tips to improve SEO ranking and hence get more traffic to your content.
- Research keywords and phrases and know your audience
- Create a meaningful title with keywords in it
- Use the keywords you've found in your content
- Add a hero image and possible other images in your content
- Add link to authoritative content and resources and add backlinks
- Write for humans and search engines
- Share and promote with your friends and network
- Measure performance and make possible improvements
- Refresh old content and let search engines know this
- Be personal and get engaged with your readers
What is SEO and why do I need to know it?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. It's the process of making your content more visible to search engines and helping you get more visitors, leads and sales by using certain keywords or phrases in your writing.
SEO is important for technical authors because it helps people find your content when they search for relevant terms.
As an example, let's say you're a technical author who writes about how to implement CRUD operations in Blazor, you want people to be able to find your article when they search Google or Bing. Not only that will help more people but it will also drive more people to your content.
Why do software developers contribute?
Before anything else, let’s start with your end game. What is your end game? Why do you share your knowledge with developer community? Why do you article articles, blogs, and share your code examples and tips? Why do you speak at a community event?
Many of us write to learn and help others. I personally write when I learn something new. I write some I solve a problem. I also write when I find a better solution than anything out there to share with fellow developers to do it better. Writing also helps me retain my knowledge and make me better when people ask questions. Writing has also brought me ton of work, fortune, and fame. Over years, I have gotten many new clients because they read my articles and code samples on C# Corner. I got many speaking and book writing opportunities because someone found my content on C# Corner.
You need to ask yourself, why do you contribute? What is your endgame? Is it to get some professional reputation? Get some side work? Build your profile and resume?
Some people learn and write content to get better at it and keep it at one place for others to learn from it. They keep their own personal blog. Others write to learn and show the world what cool things they are working on, and they share it on platforms like LinkedIn and others.
If your end game is to help more people from your experience, it totally makes sense to share your content on platforms where your content can reach more people. A platform that can not only let you host your content but also improves it and promotes it.
How?
While most content sharing platforms let you publish your content, we at C# Corner do much more. C# Corner has been around since year 2000 and for past 22 years, not only we keep improving our platform but also allow various tools for contributors to make their content sharing easier such as self-hosting and editing services. We also help with SEO and social media marketing and backlinking. We also provide feedback to authors how they can improve their content to reach wider audience.
Top contributors on C# Corner become Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) and we have several exclusive programs just for MVPs. Many C# Corner authors are now published authors for well-known publications because publishers found their content on C# Corner.
Regardless of what your endgame is, getting better SEO results and more readers on your content is always beneficial to you. Here are my top 10 tips that will help increase SEO ranking of your content.
1. Research keywords and phrases and know your audience
The first and most important thing to focus on is the content you create. You’re creating it for a reason, so make sure that reason is clear. The more focused your content, the better it will be received by search engines—and by readers.
The second thing to do is focus on what you write about. Do some keyword research and make sure that what you write about matches up with what people are searching for online (or will soon start searching for).
Thirdly, think about who your audience is and what they want from your content. If possible, test out different audiences with different versions of a page or piece of content so that you can see which one performs better in terms of traffic and conversions (e-commerce). If you are writing for developers, think about what developers would type in search engines.
How?
If you want to write an article and share code related to “binding in Blazor”, here are a few things you can do:
- Google the topic you would search in Google. Google “binding in blazor” and see what kind of search results you get in the listing.
- Go through top 3 listings and see what kind of content they list. Pay attention to the title, keywords, headings, and the size of the content.
- Now ask yourself, how your article/blog can be better than those content. Here are some of the questions – Is your content newer and better quality? Does it provide more juice to the reader? Does it have better code examples? Better images and/or tables? Does it answer questions what people may be searching for. For example, you could have a heading – Types of bindings in Blazor that none of the previous posts have.
- Create subheadings that are common questions. For example – What is binding in Blazor.
2. Create a meaningful title with keywords in it
The title is the first thing that people see. It is also the most important part of your content, so it should be descriptive and keyword rich. Closer the title is for the search phrase, better result you will get from search engines.
Reserve titles that begin with “How to” or “Do you know how to” because they don't tell readers what they're getting into when they click on them. Instead, use a more descriptive phrase such as “How to implement paging in a DataGrid”.
If have content on sorting a list control in C#, the title should be “Sorting a list control in C#”.
Try not to have more than 70 characters in the title since Google truncates any longer titles at this length. If possible, keep it under 60 characters for extra SEO benefit!
3. Use the keywords you've found in your content
You should use the keywords you've found in your content.
- In the title of your content: Make sure to include some of the most important keywords from your topic and make them stand out by using capital letters or bolding.
- In the first few sentences: If someone's reading this article, they're probably interested in learning more about it because they've already been searching for it online! So, give them what they want by including those same terms and phrases here so that Google knows that this is exactly what they're looking for!
- Featured image: Make sure to use an image with text on it so that people can easily read through all of it without having to click over again (and again). This will help increase engagement rates if readers see something interesting right away when they open up an article like yours (instead of having nothing except white space). Plus there are lots of free tools available too... like Pixlr which allows me :)
- Meta description: This is another opportunity where some extra keyword research may come in handy here because many times these descriptions tend not be very helpful unless someone is looking specifically for something specific within a given category - like "SEO tips" instead maybe? It depends though - sometimes those things don't matter as much anymore either."
4. Add a hero image and possible other images in your content
You're a technical author and you've got some great articles on the site. You've made sure that they're well-written and have a good mix of keywords to make them more searchable. But now, you want to take things one step further: use images!
With so many people reading articles online, it's increasingly important to have relevant visuals with each piece of content you publish. Not only do images help break up text and keep readers engaged, but they also help with SEO—and that means more traffic for your website in the end. To get started using images in your blog posts effectively (and easily), follow these tips:
- Make sure the image is relevant
- Use alt text for each image
- Use a descriptive title for each image
5. Add link to authoritative content and resources and add backlinks
If you have referenced your article from authoritative websites, you may want to add links to some of those content. For example, if you have referenced some of your technical content from Microsoft documentation, you may want to add link to the original content.
Backlinks are links from other sites that point to your site. They're important for search engine optimization (SEO), and the more quality backlinks you have, the greater SEO boost you'll get.
To get backlinks, write guest blogs (so long as they're well written), comment on other people's blog posts, create infographics and embed them on social media pages, build relationships with people in your industry who have large audiences and ask them if they'd like to link to you occasionally, or mention a product or service that helps your readers in one of your articles.
6. Write for humans and search engines
Your content should be easily readable and understandable by your audience. For example, if you are writing for software developers and programmers, make sure you use their language and syntaxes. I know many developers and programmers like to get to the point and be straight forward. No need to write unnecessarily that doesn’t add value for the reader.
As I mentioned earlier, to optimize your content for search engines, you should use keywords throughout the page. The easiest way to do this is to make sure they're in all of the following locations:
- Page title (the text at the top of your browser window)
- URL (the web address, or URL, that shows when you click on a link on another website)
- Meta description (text underneath your page title and before it starts loading)
- Meta tags (hidden text within tags which tell search engines what your content is about)
7. Share and promote with your friends and network
Social media is a great way to get your content in front of people. Share your articles on your social media Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Include a link back to your blog so that readers can find more content like it. If you have a WordPress blog or site, use Jetpack’s social media sharing buttons for easy sharing on the most popular networks. Alternatively, you can use plugins for WordPress if those platforms don’t work for your business needs.
Just be bold and ask your friends and professional network to share your content. If they share, don’t forget to thank them.
8. Measure performance and make possible improvements
If you use platform such as C# Corner, you can see analytics on your content in form of views, likes, and comments. Most social media platforms also provide analytics on your content that you share on your account.
You can use Google Analytics to measure how many visitors have come to your site, and which pages they’re viewing. You can also check out the “Behavior Flow” report, which shows where users are clicking within your content.
You can use Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) to find broken links on your website, as well as see how high up in the search results you rank for keywords related to technical writing.
9. Refresh old content and let search engines know this
Technical content gets old very quickly. For example, if you have written an article on Angular couple of years ago, chances are that code may not work in the latest version of Angular. It is highly recommended that you refresh your content for the latest version of Angular. Also, refreshing your old content will force Google to reindex your content.
If your content has comments and users are posting comments and asking questions, it is very important that you reply them. This will not only increase engagement on your content but will also create loyal readers. Search engines like when people revisit previous content and spend time on it.
10. Be personal and give your readers little extra
Its ok to be personal in your content and connect with your readers. You may want to share your personal experience and stories to keep your content interesting.
If you have more content on the same topic or little different, make sure to let your readers know. Here is an example:
If you like this article, here is one more article I wrote on the same topic
Conclusion
The more you understand how search engines work, the better you'll be able to optimize your content for them. The tips above will help you make sure that people find your content when they search online. We hope that this article has given you some good ideas on how to implement some of these techniques in your own writing!
More related content, check out SQL Server n