What the Heck Is SEO & Does It Matter On Medium?
What about the future and AI?
If you write online, you’ve undoubtedly come across the term SEO. You might have even read some articles about SEO and how it benefits bloggers. But do you really know what it is?
Even more importantly, is SEO important for Medium writers?
Let’s find out!
What is SEO?
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of optimizing your content to improve its visibility and ranking in search engine results pages.
The goal is to increase organic traffic by making it easier for search engines to understand and rank your content. Techniques include keyword research & optimization, optimizing website structure, and creating high-quality, relevant content.
How can you improve SEO?
Let’s do this with some bullet points.
In general, SEO is a complex topic, and improving SEO to the T is an entire job market. Therefore, no article can give you every detail important for your SEO in your online writing endeavors.
But here are the main ways to improve SEO:
Conducting keyword research and using relevant keywords in your content
Ensuring your website structure is optimized for search engines
Creating high-quality, informative, and engaging content
Optimizing your meta tags (title, description, etc.), although doesn’t have the impact some make it out to be
Building backlinks to your content from reputable sources is a crucial factor
Regularly updating your content to keep it fresh and relevant
I suggest mainly focusing on those two steps:
keyword research & optimization
Building backlinks from credible, reputable sources (like Medium)
Does SEO matter on Medium?
On Medium specifically, SEO is important for writers who want to get their content discovered by more external readers. It does NOT directly impact the discoverability of your stories for Medium members.
This means the importance of SEO on Medium depends on what you want to achieve with your stories.
If you want member reading time only, you can ignore SEO. If you want external views, high rankings on Google search, and traffic from search engines, SEO will help you a lot.
By optimizing your articles for search engines, you increase the chances of them appearing high in search results when readers search for related topics. This can lead to more views, reads, and engagement with your content.
While SEO can be a complex topic, there are some key ways to improve it for your Medium articles. These also include conducting keyword research and using relevant keywords in your content, creating high-quality, informative, and engaging content, possibly optimizing the SEO title and description in the story settings, building backlinks to your content from reputable sources, and regularly updating your content to keep it fresh and relevant.
What about the future?
Looking ahead, SEO is likely to remain an important practice for online writers and content creators. As search engines continue to evolve and improve, optimizing your content for search will become increasingly important to stand out from the competition and reach your target audience. This might include optimizing content for AI-based search engines soon, or making your human-written content stand out from AI-written content.
Speaking about AI, artificial intelligence can help with SEO. Many SEO tools already incorporate AI and machine learning to analyze data and provide insights. Here’s how:
AI can help with keyword research by analyzing search trends and suggesting related keywords.
It can also assist with content optimization by analyzing the performance of existing content and providing recommendations for improvement.
Additionally, AI can help with link-building by identifying potential sources and analyzing their authority. Overall, AI can be a valuable tool for improving the effectiveness of SEO strategies.
The bottom line
Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing online content to improve its visibility and ranking in search engine results pages. SEO is important for Medium writers as it helps content to be discovered by more external readers.
To improve SEO, you can conduct keyword research, optimize your website structure and SEO meta tags, create high-quality content, and build backlinks from reputable sources.
SEO is likely to remain an essential practice for online writers and content creators as search engines continue to evolve and improve. AI can help with SEO by analyzing data and providing insights. It’s a helpful tool for this often boring process.
Key takeaway: SEO is a critical practice for anyone who wants to improve the visibility and reach of their online content, including Medium writers. However, Medium writers can ignore it if they don’t intend on reaching external readers.