Technical writers not only prepare technical documents but also provide support and help documents as online materials that contain technical support for any particular product, service, subject, or project. Some of them write helping instructions while others are involved in writing technical contents for any specific topic or matter. There, the technical writers need to draft the technical article so that optimize searching for that article gets reflected. This chapter explains what SEO based technical writing techniques are and why they are important.
What Is Search Engine Optimization?
SEO is abbreviated as Search Engine Optimization that is performed to increase the amount and the quality of traffic to online content.
Prepare Your Technical Document Involved in SEO
All modern days' technical communicators need to have a firm knowledge of SEO or be involved in writing technical stuff keeping in mind the concept of SEO. It is because what you are producing in the form of technical content needing your customers to use also - which ultimately requires visibility online. So, for this, your customers need to be able to hit upon those contents online, and in case they cannot, then your work has no dimension over the internet.
This is where the role of SEO comes. Here is how SEO works in a few words. The Google search algorithm consists of more than 250 main ranking signals (along with exclusively thousands of other sub ranking signals) that arrange through billions of existing web pages having same or similar topics or articles discussed and indexed in its catalog for finding an answer to any search query. When you apply for SEO based practices for your content, you considerably boost the probability that your content will get land high up when search engine queries any search results.
Know SEO Keywords and Include Them in Your Content
A common practice, online technical writers need to focus on engaging with their customers by incorporating SEO keywords within the content. These keywords can be a particular word or a collection of mutually transmitted words that people enter as search queries in search engines, which helps them find out what they are technically searching for.
Your developers or senior technical writers or managers need to arrange a collective package of keywords that you, a professional writer, can implement or add to your technical document or technical article; Where to add and where these keywords will fit the content descriptions will be entirely the work of technical writers.
Here is a list of guidelines regarding the need for an approach to optimizing writing any technical content for an online product site, blog, or corporate website:
- Meta tags optimization: Each web page has a customized title with a description tag. Title tags in HTML must adopt the primary targeted SEO keyword for any particular page where the title tag should not exceed 50 to 65 characters (including spaces). Then, the description tag can contain 150 - 160 characters.
- Image with a substitute of alt tags: When the web page has images in it, make sure to put in a target keyword in the alt tag of the image to increase the SEO.
- URL: Another smart action to increase SEO in your online technical documentation is to include a keyword within the URL, but be careful to evade or avoid using extended characters or symbols such as ü or å in that URL.
- Keyword positioning: Try to keep your main target keywords within the first 2 to 3 paragraphs and the second set of keywords in the rest of the content. Also, wherever possible, use relevant H1, H2, and H3 title tags with those keywords.