How to Earn A Google Snippet with Your Medium Story

Here’s how I set out to get my Eve Lindley story on Medium to rank high on Google’s search results

How I signaled Google to consider featuring my Eve Lindley story on Medium as a snippet

I wrote a story about “Dispatches from Elsewhere’s’ Eve Lindley right before the show was set to air on AMC.

When I wrote the story, I set out to make sure that it was search engine optimized.

I don’t do search engine optimization all the time — for example, when I write poetry or stories about myself.

But, when I want to get a story to climb the search results, I set off writing with a game plan. The first goal is to create quality content that is useful. Keep that in mind as you read the rest of the steps for learning how to search engine optimize a Medium story.

How I learned SEO

I learned a lot of this by reading about SEO back when I was first starting blogging back in 2004–2005. It was fun figuring out what to do to get content to appear online. I had blogs about minor celebrities — which are actually pretty great if you want to find a consistent traffic source and not compete with saturated keywords for more famous people.

The same can be done with small businesses. I didn’t pay much for advertising when I was on my own, because the skills I had learned by optimizing up-and-coming celebrities was useful for my marketing purposes.

Google’s search engine results are constantly evolving to remain useful for searchers. Now, Google is featuring snippets at the top of their search results. If you can earn one, it is a nice accomplishment since it dominates a search result for a particular topic.

It will definitely get your article attention if you are able to achieve a high search ranking since the top three results usually get the most traffic. The snippet is even better since it takes up most of the page and dominates the search result.

What is a Google Snippet?

The Telegraph explains the significance of a Google snippet, or “position zero” in the search results.

A featured snippet, also referred to as an “answer card” or “position zero”, is a search result that gets a special second placement at the top of Google’s organic search results in addition to the standard result.

Sitting proudly above the best organically ranking webpages returned for a searched question, the featured snippet contains a scraping of information from the page selected to inform it.

— Telegraph, “How to get a featured snippet.”

Google writes about it’s search result offering, explaining about snippets:

Featured snippets come from web search listings. Google’s automated systems determine whether a page would make a good featured snippet to highlight for a specific search request.

— Google, “How Google featured snippets work.”

Google snippets show up when people ask questions of their devices or when they type in certain types of search phrases.

I happened to notice this snippet when I was checking on the SEO status of my Eve Lindley story. I had mentioned it to someone as one of the benefits of linking from other sites back to Medium stories. Even though outside traffic doesn’t earn money, it can earn attention. Sometimes that attention is useful for spreading your ideas or abilities to write or other information to people who might not ordinarily see it otherwise.

How to optimize any story

I optimized my Eve Lindley story in a couple of ways.

I used her name a lot in the story, but not so much that it might be seen as an attempt to “spam.” There’s a fine line between making content that is useful for people and that is obnoxious because it is written to attract search engine attention.

The big search engines work hard to make sure content is useful for human readers, so always have writing quality content as your main goal. Traffic is secondary. If you have the fundamental of quality content, then you can adjust your writing to help give it an edge in the competition with other stories that might be displayed when people search online.

Quality content is key

I did some quick research when I knew I wanted to write about Eve. I was interested in her new show, “Dispatches from Elsewhere,” after reading a review pre-airing. These are perfect stories for being able to rank high because if you can write a quality piece that pulls together information researched from other sources, it will be valuable to readers.

Use YouTube videos

I made sure to use YouTube videos about the show. Google owns YouTube, so it only makes sense that they like to have their own content show up in their rankings.

If you research a piece, link out to quality sources, and reinforce points with YouTube videos, you are sure to have something that Google is going to like.

Link to other sources

Link to other sources of information about your topic. Google likes it when you provide a resource that leads people to other information from your own original creations. It is similar to many of the curated works that you see online here. Someone will take four or five resources, make their creation and points referring to the primary sources, and make something that adds to the art or the science being discussed.

Keep this goal in mind with your writing. If it is useful for other people looking to learn more about a topic, it might end up being featured as a Google snippet.

Have incoming links

I linked to my Eve Lindley story from my own website, 96c.co/chris to provide a solid backlink to my Medium story. I did this purposely so that it would have an advantage when it came time for Google to make search results ranking decisions.

To make it easier, I’ve set up a system where it is easy to enter Medium links with a quick description in order to make a blog post — a modern day card catalog of information like a library or encyclopedia. Publisher’s Spotlight is designed to be like a “Reader’s Digest” of great ILLUMINATION stories. The beautiful thing is that it also provides a nice backlink for search engines to use in ranking decision-making

This is also why the RSS feeds are so important. When people have a feed going to their favorite feed reader, it helps provide another backlink to help in the search engine rankings. Illumination Amplification is an example of this in action.

This isn’t the definitive guide — I’ve been discussing writing a guide with Jezebel about SEO and writing and other topics, so keep your eyes open for that.

🦄 Chris Hedges, BA, JD, is a photographer and writer. I am an editor at ILLUMINATION, The Bad Influence, and Red Curtain Erotica. I also own Publisher’s Spotlight at 96c.co/i and Unicorn Laboratories at x29.co which are publication platforms and innovation laboratories.