Pleasing the Human and the Machine at Once: How to Write Good SEO Articles

Everybody knows what an article is, but what are SEO articles? These articles are written so that, aside from being attractive to visitors when they start reading them, they are also getting the attention of search engines and are returned as search results for relevant queries. This sums up to incorporating SEO content rules into an article without this becoming obvious to the reader. Whether you are writing for your own website or you are into freelance article writing, you must offer worthy information to readers, and not just focus on writing technically correct SEO articles. Good SEO can send an article among the first pages of search results, but a good read can improve the rank even more if readers decide to share an article and link to it on their own websites, and links count.

Guidelines to writing good SEO articles

1. First things first: the title

The impact of a good title is well known: the title sells the article to the reader. A great article might not be read at all if the title does not clearly describe it. The attractiveness of the title is for the human reader. You also have to have something good for search engines, respectively you should include your main keywords in the title.

Making a research on keywords relevant for a domain – of what search queries are typed by Internet users in search engines – can show you what words your article should revolve around so that it catches the attention of target readers and also of search engines. The main keyword of choice should be present in the title also. If the title is attractive too, it will be clicked by users. If it is not attractive, you will see that as you check page rank for that page it can lower in time if no clicks occur. That is why both keywords and attractiveness are valuable.

2. The use of heading tags

The use of subheadings is part of SEO but it also helps readers: information is easier to go through when it is broken up into chunks. Big blocks of text are difficult to follow through. Also, articles written with no care for formatting might resemble spam or mass produced texts. The HTML code must show the title and the subheadings under <h 1> through <h n> tags. Search engines use heading tags in order to identify words that are of greater importance than the rest of the text, so using keywords in a heading can be a good idea.

3. The body of the article

Keywords remain important throughout the article too, of course. The keywords spread in the article enforce the ones in the title and subheadings. This aspect concerns the search engine.

However, you need to have the reader in mind too, so repeating a keyword too many times is not a good idea, as it will get the reader tired. Where the search engine is concerned, keywords are important because they signal what the article is about, however they do not directly impact the rank. So, common practice is to use a keyword in the first and in the last paragraph and also scattered in the content.

Where density is concerned, some say that it can go to up to 4%. Usually, for the same keyword, a density of 1% is ideal, so once per one hundred words for the same keyword is enough. Related keyword phrases can be scattered through the article too, with a lower density. Remember, excessive use of keywords is a spam indicator.

4. Related keywords

As we have just pointed out, keywords can be accompanied by related keywords too. Variations on the keyword make the wording of the article sound more natural and also enforce the topic. When researching for related keywords, you can even come with new ideas on how to develop on the main keyword, what angles of the topic to explore. The Internet offers tools for researching related keywords and also there are blogging platforms that offer you the option to install plugins to help you with this activity.

5. Read your article again before posting it

Whether you are sending it to article submission sites or posting it on your own website, you must be careful not to have allowed mistakes to slip throughout the content. Proof read your article before posting it, as small errors can have great impact on readers. All in all, it is for the readers that you write and you are only optimizing your content for the engines’ spiders and algorithms. It is first an article and then a SEO article.

We have presented some of the basic article marketing tips and, hopefully, you will make good use of them.