SEO Article Writing 101 – Fundamental Tips

Welcome to SEO Article Writing 101. This article will quickly fill you in on the fundamentals of writing search engine friendly articles. We’re not going to discuss off-page factors here, like link building – this is purely about what you’re going to put in your article. We’ll start off with the basic building blocks of SEO: keywords.

SEO Article Writing 101: Keyword Research

We won’t delve too deeply into this topic here, but you should be aware that no matter how well written your articles are, they’re useless if you haven’t done your research and picked effective keywords. What’s an effective keyword? It’s one that balances out decent search demand with low competition.

In other words, you may come across a keyword that has no competition and think, “Eureka!” But there’s a reason no one is competing for that keyword: no one is searching for it, either. There’s no point in ranking well for something nobody’s looking for.

On the flipside, there’s little point chasing keywords with huge search volumes as they typically have huge competition, that will take years of work to even make a dent in.

Your goal is to find the happy medium – the keywords that are easy enough to rank well for, and will also bring in a decent amount of traffic.

SEO Article Writing 101: Keyword Placement

Once you’ve got good keywords to work with, you need to know what to do with them. First of all, each article should be build around one main keyword phrase. ONE. You can have secondary phrases, but the goal with each article is to try to rank well for one main keyword with good search numbers and relatively low competition.

Once you know you’re main keyword, there are a few places it should appear. If you’re putting the article on your own website, it should appear once in the title, keyword, and description META tags. It should also appear in the top h1 headline in the body copy. Many SEOs will argue until they’re blue in the face that that certain META tags don’t count anymore, but there’s certainly no harm in including your keyword there. Also, the filename of the HTML page should include your keyword phrase, separated by hyphens.

If the article is going on to an article marketing site, obviously you have less control over the HTML elements, but many article sites allow you to include a keyword tag. For the ones that don’t, you should make sure your keyword phrase is in the title and short description of the article.

SEO Article Writing 101: Keyword Density

Again, there’s a lot of controversy on this issue and many SEOs argue this has very little importance these days. However, as a general rule of thumb you should aim to keep the density of your main keyword to 1-3% of your article body. Up to 5% may be okay, but only if absolutely necessary. Some article marketing sites put a limit on keyword density in the articles you submit.

A Word of Warning About Writing for Search Engines

There’s no point in getting a lot of search engine traffic if people can’t read your articles – end of story. You see a lot of junk articles around the Internet that provide no value to humans – they exist only to please the search engines.

This is pretty ridiculous from a business perspective, because it’s the human readers which are going to monetize for you and buy your products or services. I’ve never had a search engine spider for a client. That’s why you must keep the needs of the human reader in mind above and beyond the elements of SEO. Don’t put more junk on the Internet – provide content that offers value first and foremost, optimize properly, and the monetary rewards will follow.

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