Simple search engine optimization tips for Steem authors and curators

TL;DR: Suggestions for authors and curators to help optimize Steem post ranking in search engines.

Introduction

Over the years, there have been many articles written for Steem's authors about how to boost search engine optimization. However, (i.) I have had difficulty understanding many of them because it's a complicated topic; (ii.) I don't recall seeing any recently; and (iii.) I think this is an important topic for curators, too. I'm not sure that I've ever seen this aspect of SEO discussed here.

I'm far from expert on this topic. Basically, in fact, I'm a novice. But, I worked with Gemini today on improving the SEO characteristics on yesterday's post, The Raptors of August in Southeastern Pennsylvania: Vultures on the Rise, Eagles and Hawks Returning, and Feather Identification, and I think I learned some useful hints that are worth passing along. So, here we go. A section for authors first, and then a section for curators.

This is not intended to be comprehensive, but in the spirit of the 80/20 rule, I just want to cover some of the quick hits that Gemini pointed out for me.

SEO Considerations for Authors

With a hosted front-end like condenser, much of the SEO capability is outside of the author's control, but there are some things that the author can do in order to bring a search audience to their blog. Four quick hitters are these: SEO-friendly titles, SEO-friendly section headings, include a "meta description" at the very beginning of the article, and use SEO-friendly link & image text.

Titles and Section Headings

SEO considerations for titles

The title gets the H1 tag (<h1></h1> or #) automatically when your post gets posted on condenser, so you don't need to use the H1 heading inside your article.

The title should be fairly short (8-12 words with 60-100 characters, according to Gemini), and it should contain keywords that someone might search for. Additionally, the earliest words of the title are the most important, because the title might get truncated in some search pages.

Yesterday's post actually has a bad title from the SEO perspective, but unfortunately it's too late for me to fix it, so all I can do is try to improve that on future posts.

I'm guessing that the choice of title might be one of the most important factors that an author needs to get right for SEO ranking.

Section Headings

The H2 and H3 markdown/HTML tags should be used for delineating sections within the article. These also should be relatively short and contain text that people might be likely search for.

Alternate text for images

When you upload an image to Steemit, it gets the alternate text, "image.png", inside the markdown code:

[image.png](https:// example.com/image.png)

Don't use that. Change it to contain text that actually describes the photograph using strings that people might search for. This is especially important in a photo blog. For example, I should have used something like:

[Three Turkey Vultures soaring high in the blue sky over the Stroud Preserve in West Chester, PA](https:// cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmNc7wNBJoU6hhDgLuBhp9fZNde5egVGpS6ku6wT6QkRMf/image.png).

The "image.png" at the end is needed. Keep it. The one at the beginning is bad. Change it.

Overview / metadata

At the very beginning of the article, include a short "meta-description" for the search engine. Like the title and section headings, this should contain relevant keywords that people might search for. The target length is about 155-160 characters.

Links and backlinks.

Link text

A bad habit of mine (from the SEO perspective) is the "click here links". This tells the search engine nothing. When you link to another article (and you should), the link text should be descriptive and it should include likely search strings.

Backlinks

Backlinks act as a vote of confidence for the external websites that they connect to. When a Steem post includes links to outside websites, if it earns enough support, those links can boost the target site's search ranking. This is described in, What are backlinks in SEO & how do I get them?.

On Steemit, external links have a "nofollow" tag, which tells search engines to ignore them. However, when a post is above the $10 payout threshold, the front-end removes that tag. This converts the links into active backlinks that pass search power to the destination site.

This is important because, studies have found that there is a reciprocity effect in digital publishing. Authors who regularly create outbound links are more likely to receive inbound links. Also, when curators upvote high-quality posts containing relevant links, it gives them the ability to help boost the search ranking of the linked site.

SEO Considerations for Curators

This is the piece of the puzzle that I don't remember seeing covered before, but I think there are implications for curators from the things that I wrote above. I'll cover a few of them here.

Automation is absolutely necessary.

For a curator to manually check the heading structure, link text, and image text would be a waste of time and effort. The curator would have to switch the browser to view the source code, or else they would have to go to a block explorer and look at the actual text. Nobody is going to do that at scale - and rightly so.

Instead, perhaps there should be an SEO-motivated voting account that analyzes post content for its SEO friendliness, votes on the posts that meet a certain threshold, and possibly resteems them too. Then, other voters can key off of that account's feed or voting history in order to focus on posts that have good SEO profiles.

It might even be argued that value-oriented curators should (almost) never vote posts that don't pass some sort of automated SEO screening first.

Link reviews

Curators should keep that $10 threshold in mind for posts that contain links. If, as a voter, we see a well-written post with relevant links, we should try to help drive the payout above $10 so the "nofollow" tag will be removed. Beyond the articles that are written here, these backlinks are Steem's voice and footprint on the Internet.

Conclusion

This is an intentionally short overview of how SEO can factor into content decisions for creators and curators. As a novice, I'm sure there's much that I'm leaving out, but the reality is that we have to balance between effort and results. In my opinion, attention to just these few topics can go a long way towards improving Steem's search placement on the Internet.

What do you think? Any other quick & easy SEO optimizations for authors or curators?

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P.S. I ran this draft through Gemini & Claude, and both agreed that there are no inaccuracies. It's certainly incomplete, but hopefully what's here is correct.