Writing SEO articles sounds very scary to new Webmasters, but let me tell you that it really is easy. It is simply a matter of following some very common guidelines.
This does not mean that you have to write like a machine just to please the search engines though, as writing for the people first should always be your number one concern. The art of writing SEO articles is having the ability to please both the search engines and your website visitors. The key is to incorporate these necessary SEO content rules into your articles without the human visitor noticing.
#1—It All Starts With a Title
I know everyone is probably sick of hearing this, but the title of your post is the most important part of your whole article. It is what people see that could possibly entice them to click on your link. Your title is the major advertising point for your article. Human visitors will see this listed in the search engines, hopefully higher rankings, and they will also see it on your blog, your RSS feeds, your CommentLuv links and many other places.
Including your top keywords in your title is also important. This gives the reader a clue as to what your article is about and should expect relating content on the page. This is also helps with your rankings in the search engines, but if people don't click on your link, then you will drop out fast. That is exactly why the title is the most important part of writing SEO content.
#2—Use Heading Tags Throughout
This practice started out for simply search engine optimization purposes, however now it seems that readers like to see subheadings as well, to break up the content into easy readable chunks.
No one likes to see a big block of text and nothing else. This looks unprofessional and appears to have no care taken on the formatting of the article. In fact an ill formatted article closely resembles spam or mass produced articles. This is not the perception that you want to create.
Therefore I like to sprinkle heading tags throughout the article. This article can be used as an example.
- The title of the article is a heading 1 <H1> tag and contains the keyword.
- The subtitles are <H2> or <H3> and randomly contain a keyword.
There are many more details I could mention here so I have prepared a free SEO report for you to download. No signup required! (If you are on my list you may already have this.)
#3—Keywords in Your SEO Articles
To enforce the signal of your keyword rich title and subheadings, you need to sprinkle your keyword throughout the article. Now this is probably more for the search engines than the humans and it is important that the human does not overly notice these keywords.
The reason we do this is to tell Google that this article is about a particular keyword. This technique will not directly make you rank higher in Google but it will tell them what your article is about.
The usual practice is to add a keyword to both your first and last paragraph and also scattered in amongst your content. Never overdo your keywords as you will be classed as a spammer.
#4—Related Keywords Rock!
This is one thing that people neglect to do when writing SEO articles, they often forget to include related keywords. They simply fill their article with keyword after keyword after keyword, with no variations, or any interesting differences.
I like to research my main keyword and grab all the related keywords and use them in my article as well. This really enforces the topic that you are talking about and also helps you write a far more informational article. It is amazing when you research and find related keywords. This process really opened your eyes to what you should be talking about with your topic. I like to use the keyword winner WordPress plug-in to find the best related keywords from right inside my WordPress dashboard. In fact I am so impressed with this product, I wrote a Keyword Winner review, detailing how I use this to get my articles ranking high.
#5—Proof Read Your SEO Articles!
Did you know that Ernest Hemingway said, “The first draft of anything is shit.” Take some time to proof read your article before publishing, as the human visitors can be very critical of small errors. This is easy to do if you always keep in mind that you are writing for the humans and only optimizing your content for the search engines.
I always like to remember, that without humans, there would be no search engines in the first place. In the end, the search engines only read the human's actions to gauge whether your article is worthy of ranking or not. So proof read your article and look at it from a human point of view. Hopefully you still remember how to do that.
Conclusion
Being a full time blogger, I am obsessed with writing SEO articles and I often hear people saying that they do not need search engine optimization in their fantastic articles. Well unfortunately, I have to disagree.
Writing an article that has not been search engine optimized is a waste of time because you are short changing your content. Writing an article that has been blended to please both the search engines and the human visitors is the best content that you can produce on your blog. This is the content that will make your blog and absolute rocking success. But just remember, there is an art to writing SEO articles because you do not want your SEO factors to stand out to the human.
I cannot stress enough the importance of the human factor in your search engine optimization efforts and I even mention this fact in my 10 point SEO checklist. It is a worthwhile read if you need to know more about writing SEO articles.
Don't make excuses or say you don't need to write SEO articles, simply learn the art for the sake of your blogs future success.
Yes Mitz Related Keywords always Rock. I always used related keyword for my article and its really awesome option to get visitor from Search Engine. It was worth reading. Thanks for sharing this article.
~ Amit Shaw
Hi Amit
I love when I hit on a great keyword, especially a buying keyword.. 🙂
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Good advise. There are several wordpress plugins that can help a webmaster or a blogger to “seo” a blog post. Some are even free. (just do a search in wordpress.org). I have also noticed that posts larger than 500 words and posts with a keyword density of around 2-4% is very popular with google. A keyword density of 2-4% means that your keyword should pop up 2-4 times pr 100 word you write.
Hi Rick
Yes I use Yoast’s WpSEO and SEOPressor for SEO plugins. There are also many more as you say. 🙂
If I imagine myself as the visitor on my blog, I also think I would only read an article with a good title that catches my eye. Also, I have super-long articles with the text flowing together without a single subtitle – just to look at it is intimidating…
Hi Lidia
yes it is very helpful to stand back and look at your blog.. I like to do this all the time.
Hi mitz! I bought a WP SEO plugin from warriorforum a few months ago called Easy WP SEO. Its working well, but i’m still waiting for some upgrades. Think i paid around $10 for it and it was free to use on multiple site.
Completely agree about the first draft being rubbish. What I found hardest is making the article readable so that I would enjoy reading it, yet keep those spiders happy.
Cheers, Will.
Yes those spiders are hard to keep happy when they come second best to humans. 🙂
The related keywords advice is good. Take it one step further, though. If your keyword is “Florida real estate”, make sure to use other words that you would expect to find in such an article, such as “homes”, “house”, “property”, etc.
You might ask why this is valuable. So consider how the search engines can tell the difference between a quality article and a keyword-stuffed article (spam). The easy was is to see if the natural partners of the keyword are there. An article that has “real estate” showing up 15 times and “house” not even once is a pretty clear sign of spam.
Good advice David, that is something I will definitely look to use. Google have mentioned this in the past, the content around keywords and links is just as important as the keywords and links themselves for SEO purposes.
Great way to explain it David! I use Keyword Winner for this as it shows me all the related words then if you dig further it gets more and more. I think it helps me bring out the words I need to look like the article has the right info. 🙂
Mitz-
As always great information. Thanks for pointing me to your article on keyword winner. Looks like a great plugin. I am glad you pointed out the the article just can’t be about keywords and needs some human interest.
thanks
sean
Hi Sean
Yes I always write for the humans first and then SEO it, then brush it up for the humans again. 🙂
This was a good reminder of what we all need to do. Thanks for the reminder. The title is very important.
Finding the balance can be hard work, but I always write with my readers as my first priority, search engines are second but it’s not exactly a close second. Why?
I don’t want a reader to find any article of mine believing it will answer their question and then be disappointed. I’d rather write a great article and do more work to promote it than write a rubbish one that appears at the top of Google.
Thanks for the great post!
Hi Rosemary..
I think google is starting to sort out the great articles and putting them to the top more. After all, the humans will ultimately decide if an article stays at the top or not, and the humans are Googles customers. 🙂
Keep keyword density under 5% in a 500 words article for your main keyword.Do not overuse them.A keyword spammed article is useless for both search engine bots and real readers.
Its better if you use your targeted keyword 3 times in a article-in the very first line of your article, at middle of your article and in the very last line of your article.
I agree with what you are saying here but I try not to ever get to 5% keyword density. I like to be around 1-2 percent and then use more related keywords.
Hi Mitz,
I really like these 5 Critical Tips for Writing SEO Articles.It’s true Keyword is more important for Writing SEO Articles but i found people fill full article with keyword and it is not good for reader point of view.
I agree totally. People do overdo it and it does not look good to the human readers.
Hi Mitz,
I read you post with much interest. I have alway tried to work with keyword presence of 1% to 2 % because it comes across to strong that your are try to sell.
Well said (or written), Mitz!
For me, #5 is my #1. In the heat of writing the article, I am often too tempted to push the Publish button, so I get my post out there. I have started training myself to wait, review again, and look for alternative SEO keywords that I can sprinkle in.
Like you, I’m a big fan of writing for the reader, not for the search engines. Check out the comic strip that I created about this specific topic at:
http://www.socmedsean.com/blog-tip-write-for-your-readers-not-the-search-engines/
Cheers!
–Sean
Nice comic strip Sean!:)
I agree that proof reading is really important and probably should be at the top of the list…especially for me as I am not good at this part.
Hi Sean, I think that you have a pint. I remember a friend who loves SEO told me that you can’t just keyword stuff the page any longer, Google often sees these pages as spammy. Instead, include some related LSI keywords that complement the post. The post will then be considered more relevant and informing, which google supposedly likes.
REally great guest post Mitz. SEO is really important part of every article that you share. Often, I am surprized at how little people use good SEO in their posts. I always tell people write first for your readers then go back and optimize it for search. that way you stand a better chance at getting more exposure.
Hey James
I am also surprised about how many people ignore SEO in their posts!! 🙂
I like to write for SEO in the first draft. The second time around I try to make it sound like a human wrote it. Thanks for the checklist — it gets to the point.
Hopefully a human did write it?? 🙂
Great tips ahead. The following tips are useful. An article with interesting title and content is rock! Thanks Mitz for the tips ahead it helps a lot.
I really appreciate this great tips on how we can take good care of the business we are handling called SEO, being an SEO is not an easy task, specially that it deals with keywords, and one must know how to proof read the article before sharing it to article directory site.
Great article! Actually writing SEO articles for human beings should not be that difficult. Unfortunately, we get programmed to write for a computer program or algorithm and we forget that people will read these articles. Great tips!
Hi,
Seo is the way to go. Playing by googles rules. Hey everyone loves the traffic so why not follow the rules. It seems you have hit upon all the major Seo tactics. Also when it comes to backlinking Google sends out the bots to see what is humanly possible. So don’t try to send out 5,000 backlinks in one day. That is a turnoff to Google. Organic is best… Thank you
Second keyword density should be between 2-5%. When it comes to both humans and SEO, don’t underestimate the value of a great pic. We are visual first and foremost.
I’d recomment installing WordPress SEO by Yoast for this. It helps you out on what you need to maximize in the articles you write. It reminds you to insert headings, images, keyword density, etc that will help boost your article.
I would like to highlight the keyword related terms that should be scattered throughout the article too. some aren’t using this strategy. But I think this seems pretty great to me. Makes your page more prone to get indexed by search engines.
Thanks for such a well-written article Mitz!
Spatch
You also rock mitz! Every post you shared are new and extremely helpful for us.
I really admire you for sharing new and quality content.
Thanks Becca
Glad you enjoyed the article. 🙂
Hey Mitz, nice points you got in this post. I actually amazed with people who can incorporate SEO into their articles. This is the reason why I apply most of the tricks you mentioned here. But as a blogger, we need to be careful in concentrating too much with SEO as this can affect how we write in the long run.
Thanks..
You are right!! We cannot over do SEO as this is not good! 🙂
Mitz, you are like a well of eternal knowledge.
Thank you for all of your awesome posts, seriously you rock.
I think I’ve been focusing too much on the human and forgetting about the search engines. There’s so much to think about when you’re just starting out.
Thanks for all the tips, you really are helping my journey.
Hi Rene
Its like following a recipe for baking a cake.. Too much of anything ruins the cake. Too little of something also ruins the balance and taste.
Thanks for sharing this great post… Writing an article without putting search engines into consideration is really a waste of time… I discovred that most of such articles on my blog did not fetch me any readers from search engines.
I just started using heading tags too… I will try out related keywords more
Thanks
I did that too Kelvin! I realized some articles did get traffic while others got nothing.. I wanted to know why as I had put a lot of work into them all. 🙂
Title of your article is really important. You must run a research on other top ranking articles, Always try to keep your title around most usual search query that relates your article.
Hi Mitz – awesome article. It reminds me that I should not neglect keywords, something I have been neglecting for a long time.
A clever post. You are taking care of SEO as well as People. That’s it. What else we need for blogging success?
Another awesome post, Mitz
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Like you, I too am in favor of “optimizing” articles for search engines. I still think that there are many people who truly does not understand the importance of SEO. These tips are great and very informative indeed and like you said, overdoing it obviously is not the right way to go. Doing nothing however and relying on the so called “they will come”.. eventually, is quite risky IMO
I, myself found SEO really scary! 🙂 But if I would base on your tips it’s like an easy a! Thank you for sharing this.. keep up the good work!
Solid article that you have here hun. Whenever I write my articles I always try to write with my readers in mind as well as for SEO purposes.
To get the best results is by sprinkling the keywords all over your blog article.
Thanks for this lovely post 🙂
#5 hit be bulls eye! aside from it, i learned one thing – that related keywords matter.
thanks for this!
I know that when I follow the same steps that you have listed above, I don’t have a problem writing articles, but when I do any of them out of order, it usually ends up in a disaster. You should also include taking breaks – sometimes that can help you stave off writers block – at least it works for me…
You are right about taking breaks… If I have a problem writing an article I just leave it and go onto something I can write at the time. Then later I go back. I do not write an article unless it flows for me.
Hey Mitz,
Very informative but you’re right, writing your web content, articles, guest posts, whatever it is, needs to SEO optimized.
That may scare some people but it’s not that hard. I have a checklist tapes to my wall. I simply just write my article, then go through the optimization steps one by one. After you do it just a handful of times it will be second nature to you and the best part is you’ll begin seeing your content rise up in the rankings as more and more people see it.
Great tip there, taping a list to your wall.. That way you can’t miss it!
Also if you keep doing this it becomes a habit.. 🙂
This is a great thanks. It can be hard sometimes to balance who you’re writing for. You have to please the humans that read your articles but you also have to please the bots. It’s important to have that balance. We can all learn more from this article, thanks.
By adding categories to your blog that are relevant, they can arrange and clean up everything. It will be necessary to have all your content in the right order so it’s clear to the visitors of your blog and to the search engines as well. It’s nothing but getting rid of the clutter and making the information organized. If you make sure that the permalink function is “on” for your blog, you’ll notice the category will be listed in the post and the URL. Not only does this give a boost to your SEO efforts, it also lets your visitors know exactly what the post is about because they’ll see it in the URL.
This is a great tip. Thanks for sharing! 🙂
I agree with all your five points Mitz. Writing for humans is very critical if you want to see any success with your online marketing efforts. What’s the point of having loads of gibberish that attracts traffic but turns away the visitors?! As is evident from your tips, its crucial to maintain a balance between targeting the search engines and retaining the attention of the reader. At the core of a good piece of content that attracts the reader is that it should have something of value for the reader…
Hi Raj
Yes I like to keep the balance in everything in my life.. It really applies to all. A bit of this and a bit of that! Of course great content is the main ingredient. 🙂
This is such a great and informative post and all the above mentioned tips are cleared to me. But i just have one question to ask that what is the maximum length for any title and how can we choose good keywords for our article.
Hi Will
Your title should be concise and to the point, yet grabbing. Long tittles are not appealing. 🙂
I love tip5, cant say how many times I have found that reading an article over again does sound as it says $hit, so a rewrite can make a whole lot of positive difference.
Thanks for this great post
I am guilty of not proof reading thoroughly but I am getting better! 🙂
Great information. Thanks to Share this Articles Post ,
write Article so Follows thses rules:-
Include the Title.
Title, Keywords & Content Should be unique.
For the love of all good blog practices, Please ALWAYS do #5 – whether it’s an article for SEO or not. It drives me nuts when I see typos and other errors in posts. But then again, I saw one in my own site the other day (and fixed it), so I guess I’m not immune to these errors, even with proofreading.
I do proof read but just skim through and I miss stuff sometimes. I also use weird words and twist old sayings to suit me.. But that is who I am in my writing and real life.
I do make spelling errors though but I definitely do not intend to.
So, I realize that my comment may have sounded a bit harsh and aimed at you! I really meant that just in general, I think it’s important to proofread. (I hadn’t found anything in your post that I thought you should have caught!)
I always do keyword research & normally it works cool . 🙂
I always have one confusion. You explained above that put keywords in the H1 and H2 tags. I can do it very easily in WordPress. But how it can be put to a website made with “cmsmadeeasy”? there is no option to do so.
I think the most relevant ones in my opinion would be the related keywords.
I really like your suggestion of adding Heading Tags throughout the article. I can see where it would visually spice up the article and keep a reader interested. Thanks for the idea!
great information. i like all the suggestions, but proof reading is the best in all. Keyword are most important but the use of these in proper way is more important . title must be attractive and interesting. overall this is nice post. thanks for sharing.
Hmm, nice one Mitz. I’ll tell you what I like most… the fact that you’ve written an article on the importance of writing SEO articles, and actually followed your own advice. Not every blogger/writer does this, believe it or not. The fact that you’ve managed to not bore me, someone who reads and writes all day long daily, is an achievement in itself, and means that I will now be following your posts and spreading the word. Keep up the great job — looking forward to your next piece. 🙂
yes at the end of the day we are all human, and adding very down to earth content is perfect
catching titles, descriptive paragraphs
have the visitors wanting more content!
thanks
So much has been said in the article and comments that is all good but I think that with Google’s upcoming “SEO refresh” there will be more emphasis than ever on just plain good content. Less “All The Right Keywords In All The Right Places” (apologies to One Republic) and more just plain good content. At least I, for one, hope so…
Hi Mitz,
Great post, thanks for sharing!
All of it makes for good blog writing, especially #5 Proofreading. This element for me is so important, very often I write something and then get caught up being too close to the article. Taking a step back and actually reading it like a site visitor will often throw up one or two errors.
Keep up the good work!
Regards,
Glenn
Hi Mitz,
Nice article . Really loved it. The best one was the 5 th point, because while writing contet we really forget sometimes that we are writing for humans and not search engines by stuffing too many keywords.
#4—Related Keywords Rock! – I actually did focus on related keywords when I was doing my optimizations, but now I’ll definitely do, thanks