The majority of internet marketing advice you read on the internet today about SEO articles always require that users write articles not for search engines but for readers.
This is certainly true but the statement itself is slightly misleading. There are many articles and sales pages on the internet that do not use a single keyword or key phrase because they are writing for users but because of that their pages do not pop-up anywhere.
Experts from some of the leading SEO services suggest that articles need to strike a balance between writing for readers and for search engines. Below we look at what steps you can take to strike the right balance.
Rule no. 1: Incorporate your main keyword into the title page
Your page’s title needs to be enticing, specific and clear, like any good headline yet it needs to also contain your keyword. However, when including a keyword the title itself shouldn’t sound awkward, if it does move on to use another keyword.
For instance, if you were writing an article about WordPress security and needed to include ‘WordPress’ Security as a keyword, a good and enticing headline would be “DIY WordPress Security Made Simple”.
You will notice a few things with this title:
- I started the title with the keyword that we wanted to target, this is then followed by a luring yet effective after thought because everyone wants to learn a simple way to achieve something that is considered complex. Feel free to use colons and hyphens in your title to make it more luring and to include your keyword.
- The ‘made simple’ words were used because many people have grown to associate these words with an easy to follow tutorial.
Rule no. 2: Your sentences need to be relevant and specific
Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes many webmasters and businesses make is that their body copy is lengthy without much focus on the keywords they should be targeting. Some don’t even address the topic until you’re half way to the end.
Start your sentences with attention grabbing, informative and well written lines. For instance, building on the earlier WordPress Security example, your opening sentence should look something like this:
“WordPress security should be of prime concern especially since close to 25% of all WordPress blogs and sites are hacked each year. We look at a step by step method of securing your WordPress site without having to know PHP or CSS. Though knowing a little of both these programming languages will help further secure your site.”
Rule no. 3: The title tags should be interesting
The title tags are especially important for SEO articles and happen to be different from the article’s title. This goes into the code of your webpage and is mainly intended for search engines. That said, this title does appear at the very top of the bar.
However, you can skip this rule if you are writing a blog post for another website unless they specifically state that you need to write the title tags. This along with the meta description is very important because these show up in search engine results and so are the first thing that people read prior to deciding if they want to click and visit your website.
You have just 70 characters within which to fit your keyword in an attention grabbing sentence. So, by furthering the example from Rule no. 1, let’s say that you’re now going to draft the meta-data for the article on WordPress Security, it would look something like this:
“WordPress Security Tutorial for newbies” or it could be something more technical like: “WordPress Security demystified by SEO expert Mark Lewis”
Final word about writing SEO articles
A few years back when search engines like Google and Yahoo were not that intelligent, people got ranked well for stuffing lots of keywords into one article. There were even some SEO services that used hundreds of pages of nothing but keywords!
Today, even rewriting somebody else’s article to get some attention does not work, as a matter of fact it can get you penalized. The best way is to try and publish content that is relevant to your niche, is well written, and provides a unique spin on a subject which in turn adds value.
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License: Creative Commons image source
License: Creative Commons image source
Nathanael Vanderkolk has been a content writer for over two decades. He has written a number of eBooks and run one of the best SEO services in Australia. His articles and blog posts have managed to remain on the top despite numerous updates to Google’s search engine. His secret is to keep things simple when drafting content.
