Whether you want to grow your blog or promote your company’s website, in today’s world, it’s no longer enough to just write articles on something you’re passionate about. Instead, it’s important to write SEO-friendly articles that interest people and get ranked high by search engines at the same time. The field of SEO can be incredibly confusing if you’re not a professional, which is why we’ve created this article to help you write high-quality, SEO-friendly content that will appeal to both people and search engines.
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SEO article example
No matter how much information you read about something, you need to see at least one good example to really understand what it’s all about. SEO-friendly articles are no different! This is why in addition to telling you all about writing high-quality blog posts optimized for SEO, this article also serves as an excellent example of SEO writing. If you want to see more samples of articles optimized for search engines, check out these posts on our site:
How to write an SEO text?
Do your research first when writing an SEO article
As with most content writing, the creation of any SEO-optimized article should begin with research – lots of research! At this initial stage, you should come up with a topic for your article and read through other articles on the same subject that are ranked highly on Google or any other search engine. This will help you get an idea of what exactly you need to cover in your post, what the outline should look like, what the optimal length of the article is, etc.
Identify and capture keyword search intent
Once you’ve found the primary keyword that your article is going to target, you need to understand what the person who types in the keywords is looking for, what is the meaning of their search query. When you’re writing the article, your goal should be to get a complete understanding of the searcher’s intent and then tailor your article to capture that intent (and do it better than the competition).
Pro tip: To gain an edge, take a look at the “Related searches” and “People also ask” categories to identify things that should be covered in the article but are not covered in your competitor’s articles.
Determine the length of your SEO friendly article
Back in the day, most writers created posts that had 300-500 words at most to maximize the number or articles they could post on their website and it actually helped their sites rank highly on Google. But in the past few years, Google started prioritizing articles that were much longer in format because they provide more information for the reader and, therefore, are more helpful. Today, if you’re writing an article on a competitive topic, it needs to have at least 8,000-12,000 characters or over 2,000 words to have a chance of getting ranked highly by search engines.
However, things are not that simple. While the rule above works often, it doesn’t work all the time, so your best bet would be to conduct an analysis of the highest-ranking articles on your site and determine the optimal article length that YOUR readers prefer.
Keep an eye on keyword density and keyword frequency
Back in the day, some people used a technique called ‘keyword stuffing’ to help their content rank higher in search engine results. The premise of keyword stuffing was very simple – if you wanted your article to rank highly when someone searched for a “local plumber”, then you have to use those keywords as many times as possible in the article even if it looked unnatural to the reader. As a result, the page was ranked highly for that keyword search. However, Google quickly caught on to the fact that this technique created useless and spammy content, which is why today keyword stuffing can only hurt your article. Find out what you should do instead in the next paragraph!
Use LSI (Latent Semantic Keywords) to your advantage
The term LSI or latent semantic keywords refers to words that are related to your primary keywords. Essentially, LSIs are keyword synonyms. For example, “pipe repair near me” is an LSI of your “local plumber” keyword. Using different LSIs instead of repeating the same keyword over and over again will help your article rank higher for a whole series of search requests instead of just one keyword search.
Optimize your article from a technical standpoint
Writing an SEO-friendly article comes down to more than just content – no matter how great your article is, there are a few technical aspects you need to take care of before posting it on your site. Here’s a short checklist of things to keep in mind that both beginner and professional SEO copywriters and bloggers should use:
- Article meta title
- Meta description
- Image Alt Attribute
- Links to other articles
- Heading tags
Meta title for SEO-optimized articles
It is important to know that there are two types of article titles: a post title that humans see and a meta title that the search engine sees. You can create two separate titles for each article or you can just have the post title – if you don’t specify a meta title, Google will use the post title instead. One thing you should keep in mind is that a meta title should always have keywords in it. Additionally, keep the title between 50 and 60 characters to ensure that it will be displayed correctly by Google.
Article meta description
Whenever you search for something on Google, you get a page of 10 results all of which have a title and a meta description, which is located below the title. These meta descriptions are incredibly important for search engine ranking – if your article doesn’t have one, it has virtually no chance or getting to the first page of search engine results.
A meta description should be written as a sales pitch that entices the reader to click on your article instead of others. The length of a meta description should not exceed 160 characters and it should contain a few target keywords. You can add a meta description to your article using any WordPress SEO plugin or embed it in the code of the page with the article.
Add an image Alt attribute to every photo
When you add images to your article, you do it to improve the quality of the post for humans. But when writing an SEO-optimized article, it’s important to also think of the search engine, which can’t recognize photos. At the same time, the search engine can read the name of the image – this is why you should give each image you upload to your site a name that describes exactly what is in the photo.
In addition to naming your images properly before uploading them, you should manually add an alt attribute that includes keywords to each image to bring in traffic from people who search Google Images.
Add links to other articles when writing an SEO post
No matter how thorough and well-written your article is, there’s always more information that could be included on the topic and Google knows it. And since the main goal of Google is to organize all the information on the web, it gives a higher search engine ranking to pages that include links to other sources that can provide additional information on the topic. There are no clear guidelines on the number of links you should include but adding a mix of links to other articles on your site and articles on other websites can help your new post rank higher on Google.
At the same time, you should take extra time to craft good link anchor text that contains keywords relevant to your article. This way both people reading your article and the search engine will understand what the purpose of the link is.
Use heading tags in every SEO article
Heading tags are another simple but crucial attribute of any article that can make or break your post’s positions in search ranking. Using subheadings can also help simplify and organize your long SEO article, making it easier to navigate for readers.
Tools and services for writing SEO-friendly articles
Just like any other task, SEO copywriting is much easier to master if you use the right tools. Below, you’ll find a list of the best SEO tools for copywriters that you should try today.
Google Search Console
This tool that comes straight from Google has numerous useful features that every SEO specialist should use. For instance, you can use Google Search Console to check the mobile version of your site, find and fix broken pages, links and other errors on the site, determine which keywords bring in the most traffic to your site and much more.
Grammarly grammar checker
Grammarly is an amazing tool that can help make your writing smooth and error-free. The easiest way to use this tool is to install the Grammarly plugin to your browser. This way Grammarly will automatically check the text for mistakes any time you write something in Google Docs, online text editors or even your email.
Hemingway Editor
Even though an article is free of grammatical errors, it doesn’t mean that’s it’s easy to read and understand. This is where Hemingway Editor comes it – this tool checks your text and highlights all the sentences that are difficult to read and all the instances where you’ve used passive voice. You can then use this information to make your post easier to comprehend.
Quetext plagiarism checker
Every writer uses other websites as sources when creating his own unique article but sometimes, you can inadvertently copy someone without even realizing it. Fast plagiarism checkers such as Quetext check your article against all the other content on the web, identify text fragments that appear in other sources and highlight them for you so you can change the wording to make your article 100% unique and compliant with Google’s plagiarism policies before posting it.
Keyword Density Checker
As mentioned previously, your article should not be overstuffed with keywords and Keyword Density Checker can help you make sure of it. Just copy and paste your article or a URL to your post into the tool and it will calculate the density of keywords in the text. Ideally, they should not exceed 1-2% of the article for maximum SEO friendliness.
Frequently asked questions about writing SEO articles
What is an SEO article?
An SEO article is any article that’s written with search engine optimization in mind. SEO articles are written both to provide quality information to the reader and to help the website where the articles are posted to rank higher on Google and other search engines. The main difference between an SEO and a regular article is content structure, keyword placement and technical features of the page.
What is an SEO content writer?
An SEO content writer is a person who researches and writes SEO-optimized content. This can include blog posts, guides, how-to articles, lists and virtually any other type of written content.
Do copywriters need to know SEO?
Today, most writing a copywriter does in either meant specifically for the internet or is bound to end up there anyway. This is why every copywriter should have at least some knowledge of SEO. If you’re looking to hire a writer for your website or blog, SEO knowledge and experience is the first thing you should look for in a copywriter.
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