Many website owners and operators want SEO articles for their website. But what does it actually mean? I will try to answer this question and add five tips on how to make SEO articles yours too.
What is it all about
SEO articles are articles that are optimized to appear in search engines. In other words, an SEO article about “How to choose a lawnmower” should pop up as high as possible on the List and Google when someone searches for that keyword combination.
Whether this happens depends on how optimized the article is within the site (on page SEO) and how trustworthy your domain is (off page SEO).
Today, we’ll focus on tips for on-page optimization.
Specific tips for SEO articles
What search engines consider good articles is constantly changing. Algorithms are undergoing updates. And even if your articles rank first in search engines now, they may not tomorrow.
However, Google’s search algorithm changes are trending. Personally, I’d say it’s a trend:
- fighting spam
- fighting low quality content
- and unfortunately, the increasing importance of domain authority (typically a problem for new sites)
Unless you create quality, original content that matches what people are looking for and helps them for a long time, you’re in the clear. And I would venture to guess that more updates will help you rather than hurt you.
Unfortunately, however, it’s laborious.
If you are willing to put the effort into creating articles, however, I believe the tips below will help make the effort as effective as possible.
1. Choosing the right keyword
The key to getting people to find what you’re writing about is to name your article correctly. Often a good title can be guessed intuitively.
- Title the article descriptively (so it’s clear what it’s about).
- If you have the space, also do a quick keyword search and use those words in the article.
- Use the most searched word in the main title, url, and at the beginning of the in-text content if possible
2. Writing style
The goal is for search engines to understand the structure of your article and to get positive signals from people that the article is about what they were looking for (so that people spend time on it).
The tips below can help you achieve these goals.
Hierarchical Structure
Each page should have only one main heading (H1).
Other headings should be in a hierarchy and follow the structure.
H2 -> is subtitled H3. H3 -> is subtitled H4. When H3 is followed by H2, you have finished one topic section and are starting another.
If you don’t follow the basic structure and use headings as you please, you won’t impress the search engines.
Readability
What is and isn’t readable is easily a matter of opinion. I think it’s worth looking at factors like:
- Short sentences
- Short paragraphs
- Large font
- Illustrations where they make sense
When your text reads well, people will read it. Which Google will recognize and reward you.
3. Internal links
You should link within your article. You should link to pages outside your site, but most importantly you should link to other articles and pages on your site.
Links must be contextual
Unless you’re a huge portal and list links to 7 related articles from your site at the end of the article, it won’t help you in any way.
You want to link to other articles within your site in the text, naturally, contextually.
Only one link from a page to a specific page
You don’t link from one article to the same article multiple times in different ways.
You should only link to each post once within an article.
You can, of course, use 20 links to 20 different posts from your site in an article. This is the ideal situation.
But always make sure they are links to different posts.
4. Tools
Help yourself with the tools. A simple checklist, such as the one you can create based on this article, is a basic tool you can start using for free. I believe you will be positively surprised by the results.
Among the SEO tools, you can then choose something useful for any part of the process. From keyword analysis, to the actual writing, to tracking how your content is performing after publishing.
The main thing is to have a process (I’d start with a checklist). You can then optimize and improve it endlessly.
5. Search console
Once you’ve finished the article, each time go to the Google search console and submit the article URL. This is such an important thing that I even wrote a separate mini how-to article about it, describing a quick and rudimentary procedure on how to do it.
Try it and see.
Summary: the main thing is to write. Once you’re writing and your articles are coming out, you can start optimizing the process. Starting with a checklist seems like a reasonable choice to me.
SEO has the advantage that you can optimize articles backwards as well. So don’t worry that if you don’t write a perfect article the first time, there’s nothing you can do about it.
Articles are not images.
Let me know what experience you have with writing SEO articles! And good luck with your writing!
