I've learned a lot of SEO wizardry over the last few years while tinkering with learning website design. If we were to take Steem a little more seriously, content creators would be making Steem posts targeting very specific low competition google "keyword phrases". I am working on a blog inspired by the Khmerican Family Abroad series I do here on Steem.

I am aware of Steempress, and the norm is to post on your personal blog and then Steempress it to bring it over here. However, I've learned during website design that content is 10%, markdown is 10% and SEO is 80%. It is absolutely boring and tedious to tweek a post for SEO optimization.

An example is my "Kofta-Inspired Veggie Burgers" post I made here on Steem. That post is slowly being transformed into a post for my website, which is a far from finished hot mess right now, and therefore not sharing the domain just yet.

But my point is, I had to totally deconstruct that post. After some google keyword research and planning, I settled on the keywords "kofta burger recipe" as the keywords which I feel have a monthly search rate high enough to be worth the post, and a low amount of search results for that specific keyword set. The whole post had to be transformed into a "kofta burger recipe" post. Those words have to be repeated everywhere possible. Even before I uploaded the images to my library, I retitled them from random numbers like "1247.jpeg" to "kofta-burger-recipe-featured-image.jpeg", because google likes seeing the keywords even in the image names. Repeating the keywords in the "h3" and "h4" header tags goes a long way too.

Some easy basic beginner stuff we could all start to do on Steem is to plan our title carefully, and reuse words from within the title in our h3 and h4 headers. Using h1 headers outside of the main title for the post is not recommended. So basically h2, h5 and h6 headers can be used without much thought or SEO concerns. Also it would be wise to rename our images including the same keywords before uploading to Steem.

This would be a small shift in the right direction. Too many times I google search a tribe or token's logo or banner, and I find something I created before the very logo the tribe uploaded. This comes down to very basic things like naming your images. I googled "ocd steem banner" and found something I created for a footer months ago listed on page 1 of the search results in google images. These are just examples.

I hate to admit I love Steem because of the freedom of not worrying too much about SEO when posting. I don't even do keyword planning before I post on Steem, I just let the consciousness stream flow. If I like what I created when it's done, I do some keyword research and see if it can be turned into a post for my future website that will be very competitive for a specific keyword set I can alter it to. Also, this won't create any interference between Steem and my future similar website post, as the vocabulary and syntax are too different for google to penalize me.

I do go to the trouble to name all my images something similar to my title for basic SEO optimization, but I do zero thinking of keywords when steem blogging. I have been drumming up some bounty ideas for possible low competition highly searched keyword sets that we incentivize Steemians to blog about. Some of the trouble on Steem is that there is no way to test your post's SEO characteristics in real-time in the editor. I have a the Divi Builder, YOAST SEO plugins and various other things that allow me to change things in real time when I am creating a website post. However, I've gotten so used to the requirements, I could probably make the perfect Steem post for a keyword set without ever needing to analyze it first.

For me, I simply don't have the time to the days doing SEO optimization for my Steem posts. Post payouts are done after 7 days, and there SEO optimization is a long-term game. There's simply no incentive for Steemians to do SEO optimization. It's extra work for no reward, and it won't improve any results within Steem, as it's all about the tags here.

I do see this as a barrier preventing Steem from becoming mainstream, because we do need SEO optimization to grow this platform organically.