Would you not like to get more readers & visibility of your article? Anyone can write an article. but it takes an SEO optimized article to reach more people, the qualified target audience. You may write the best article content & quality-wise but if it’s not search engine optimized then the potential traffic that you can drive from search engines like Google & Bing will be lost for good, Google may not even know that your content exists.
To rank your article on the search engine you need to write an article that is SEO friendly. While writing an SEO friendly article, there are several things you should keep in mind.
In this post, I will share some tips for writing SEO Optimized content that will boost your webpage on the search engine result page, this post covers everything you need to know before going for article submission.
Read the following article to understand how to write SEO Optimized Article
1. Research and Analyze
Research and analyze the topic. There are several things to research before writing on any topic. Doing research will be worth your efforts. you get a better understanding of what users and google wants.
→ Competitor research
Search the keyword on google and analyze the first 3-5 articles that rank on google, this is what users like. Check their SEO metric, this will impact how easily you can replace it or not. If the #1 ranking article has 2.5K keywords then that indicates that it will take long-form content to beat that, you may even need to be creative and innovative with titles and headlines to hit the sweet spot.
→ Keyword Research
Do keyword research. What search queries users put into the search bar. Make a list of LSI keywords for your article. What’s the competition level?
Don’t just work on Focus keyword ingraining it into site title, meta description & slug, work on how you can modify the headlines within the article such that the headlines don’t contain exact focus keyphrase but rather contains modifications of it which are related, that way you stand a chance of ranking for more keyphrases.
→ Content analyze
Read the first few articles to understand what people want. Analyze the content and write an article that covers all these points and adds some more valuable information so your writing is not similar just like that.
→ Length of the article
Check the length of the competitors’ articles and write more than that. You can various free tools to know the length of articles. This will help you to stand out on the search engines.
→ Community Q/A
Google shows similar queries related to the search phrase. Check out these and pick up which makes sense. Adding an FAQ section will only add value to your article holistically, besides FAQ containing article qualifies for many featured snippet opportunities.
2. Create an Outline of the article
Search Engines provide a good weight to the outline, So it is important your outline must contain your keyword. The title is the first thing that spider(Search engine bot) crawls.
Write an engaging, catchy and meaningful title with your focus keyword. It increases your CTR through a search engine.
The outline must be optimized with proper header tags & structured data markup so that your article can qualify to appear for featured snippets. Google always looks out for quality content, the content appears to be of quality if it follows the best practices like outline.
3. Work of Meta Data of the article
→ Site title
Create a catchy site title that is under 67 characters including your website name, it is titles that appears in the search results, users focus and attention is triangulated towards the blue colored site title which then provokes them to click the result and discover the content.
Hence titles like “9 Proven Ways to Grow Your Instagram within 90 Days” would work instead of “Grow your Instagram”
→ Slug
Slug also known as URL should contain your focus keyword and it should be of ideal length such that it doesn’t get truncated, contains focus keywords, doesn’t seem wordy and most importantly it shouldn’t contain stop words, if you use Yoast SEO Plugin then that informs you if the URL Slug exceeds the ideal length.
→ Meta Description
A short description of the article. What users see on the search engines. Your Meta description must contain your focus keyword and don’t do keyword stuffing. Put up the keyword only 1 time and make it sensible so engaging.
When a user reads it on the search engine so that it will be curious to learn more about it and click on the link.
Expert Advice:- Keep it under 155 characters. Characters exceeding this length will be truncated.
4. Heading Section
The heading is yet another important aspect of SEO Optimized. There are few heading tags (h1, h2, h3) that google considers for ranking. Use proper heading and sub heading into your article. Also, don’t forget to put keywords.
By default your title is H1 heading, So you can use other subheadings h2 or h3 to put your keywords. It is a better writing format to add proper heading and subheading into your article especially when you write a long post.
It’s about how much importance you want to give to headlines, the article page as a rule of thumb should only have one H1 header tag, there can be more H2, H3 & H4 tags, you assign tags as per importance. So to headlines like “4 Step Process to Install X” should be in H2 Tag.
5. Alt Attribute
Google can’t read images. An alt tag is how google recognizes text. Add a keyword into your alt tag so that will be easy to understand what the image is about.
Adding an alt tag would help you in a more effective way. Many people do mistakes and upload the image by default name it’s also a big mistake. Before uploading an image rename your image with your focus keyword. It will impact on your search ranking.
People also tend to perform Google Image searches, you article image containing Alt Attribute qualifies to rank in image searches, it doesn’t take more than that to master Image SEO.
Do not add text that is irrelevant to the context of the image deliberately containing focus keywords, that is regarded as keyword stuffing. Add alt text that’s relevant to the image and describes the image.
6. Use Rich Media
Use rich media like images and videos. Having at least one rich media increase the chances to stand out on the search engines. Post having the media get better user’s responses without it.
You can add some infographics or videos for a better understanding of users. Visual media breaks the monotony of having to read huge chunks of text & increases the bounce rate, media like infographics and videos moreover increases the dwell time by users.
7. Inbound & Outbound Linking
Internal and external linking is a crucial ranking factor, with internal linking you get to establish the authority you have over the topic by laying out related pieces you have created already & with external linking you are referencing credible sources for more information over the subject matter who have their exclusive expertise, for example for a Social Media Marketing topic you may reference external links from sites like Social Media Examiner or Socia Media Today.
Let us know if you have any SEO writing suggestions. If you have any query feel free to contact us via the comment section. Share your experience and don’t forget to like, share and subscribe to the latest post.