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.