Whether you are writing a blog article, web page article, press release or products and services descriptions, SEO optimizing your article for the internet is a must. The internet is made up of trillions of web pages. How the web page is displayed is dependent upon the information you are wanting to showcase within your perfect SEO article and what type of functionality is needed to accomplish your end goal.
The difference between a SEO optimized article being viewed by the public on the internet or not being seen at all is in-part based on how you construct the page. Though there is thousands of opinions on how to create a #1 page rankable article, we will indeed be showing you how to create one.
You might ask, "what makes The Turn Group an expert on how to properly format a web page for the search engines?" You might ask "how did we come by all of these steps that we claim will produce results?"
A #1 page ranking article is a reproducible step by step process!
Well perhaps it is because of our experience level, or perhaps the results we get for our clients, or maybe it’s because of the number one rankings we are able to achieve or because we have a certified Google SEO master on staff. Or it could be because you found this article and are reading it. Suffice it to say, what we are about to reveal to you will produce results every single time.
Before you even put pen to paper so-to-speak you need to do a little homework. There are several steps you must take before you begin writing a Google searchable article. First, you must determine what you are going to write about. Is it about a product, a service or just information you want to provide to the public?
First and foremost you MUST understand that your article will not be found organically if you do not narrow your focus/topic to a keyword string. Your authoritative internet article ALWAYS needs to be written around a keyword. Did you know that you can write an article about a product or service without actually mentioning the actual product or service? Ya I know right! Well those who do that wonder why no one ever comes to their website.
You should have your 1-3 keyword string determined by now. Your keyword string you chose needs to be incorporated into the title of your article.
Title of article: Our viewable title for this page (at the very top) is "The Perfect SEO Article". Now, you need to create two more things. Your web page "title tag" and your web page "description tag. These are the top 2 of 4 of the MOST critical aspects to your web page creation.
TitleTag: Your invisible web page "title tag" should be close to or almost identical to your viewable page title. Our invisible "title tag" is "How to write the Perfect SEO Article" and can be found in two places.
Description Tag: Your hidden description tag is a 160 character sentence describing the content of your article. Do not use more than 160 characters and do your best to not duplicate your keywords used in your title tag but choose words that compliment or vary. For example, here is our title for this page:
Is your website, blog, products or services pages not bringing you the visitors, rankings or money that they should? Follow these guidelines to produce #1 page rankable articles every time.
Look close! You will see our different targeted audience within our description tag without having to duplicate our title tag keywords. So if someone Google's "the perfect SEO blog article" between our title tag and description tag our page will be shown to the searcher. Your description tag and your title tag should completely compliment each other without duplication if possible so that if users Google different variations of your keywords as in our example, your web page will still show up.
The type of article that you are writing albeit a blog article, web page article or about a product or service will determine if you need to also designate article tags or categories that the article will be placed into. This is an important step in preparing to write your article. If this is a blog article and your blog software supports tagging you will want to choose at least 5 to 10 keyword tags that you can tag your article with that is relevant to what you are writing about. Since this SEO article will be going into our blog, we will tagging this article with the following keywords.
The category that this article will be going into is unique to each companies structured page layout within their website. And if done correctly, the category will be related to the topic you are writing on. For some or most, this will not apply.
Now that you have 1) chosen your keyword, 2) created your page title 3) created your title tag and 4) finished your description tag, one of the final steps needed to be finished before you actually start writing your article; images! No article, in our opinion, should be written without images that best represent what you are writing about. How boring is it to read a book on the internet. That is what books are for. Want your readers to keep reading? Entertain them with images. We generally use stock images for our blog articles. There are several stock image websites to choose from. Choose at least 1-3 images that you will use throughout your article to break up the monotony of the text.
The final step in preparation to writing your article is getting your external/internal links if applicable ready, link title tags, image title and alt tags and keyword tags related to your article prepared and your calls to action. If you created tags already in step 4, you can also use those for your keyword meta tags.
At this point you should have the following items completed.
I bet you didn't realize all of the preparatory work that goes into writing a SEO optimized article did you? These steps listed are of crucial importance to producing the perfect SEO article, and over time, if done correctly, will provide a leg up over your competition as well as a healthy return on invest. Shall we get started?
Note: NEVER use Microsoft Word, your email client or any other word processor to create an article. ALWAYS use either notepad and or most preferable use this free online editor which allows for formatting AND provides the HTML code you would give to your webmaster to upload on your website. The reasons for this would require a whole other article. Trust me, your best bet would to use the editor. The only down side is that it does not allow you to save it. To do this, simply copy the HTML code into a notepad document and save it. You can always go back, paste the HTML back into the editor and finish your editing.
As mentioned above there are 4 critical must do's when writing an article for SEO purposes. The first two have been mentioned. Your title and descriptions tags. The third critical item you must pay attention to is your first paragraph. Sometimes we have found that the search engines will bypass your description tag or at most also use your first paragraph as a determining factor to display your page within the returned results of the search engines. The first 160 characters of your first paragraph should reiterate what your article is about in case the search engines decide to pull content from your page versus using your description tag when determining value for a search result.
When preparing an SEO article, there are formats which would serve you well to follow. For example, H-Tags otherwise known as header tags are the 4th most important aspect of an article. It lets your users know and the search engines know how your article is broken down. The page title should be your first header tag or H1. If you do not know how to add header tags into your articles, please contact a webmaster immediately. You do not want to write an SEO article without them.
Our H1 is our page title. Our H2 is "how to create the perfect SEO article" and our third h-tag or H3 is "writing the perfect SEO article." Notice in each header tag you find variations of our keyword but our main keyword is in it each time. This is very important. We suggest 3 h-tags, but you can use up to 6 if you want. One thing you will notice, depending on the platform your article will be placed on, the larger the number of h-tag you use, the smaller the text becomes for that tag. This size of the h-tags can be altered using CSS.
The use of your main keyword within your article and the calculation of how many times it shows up in relation to how many words your document makes up is called Keyword Density or Keyword Ratio. How do you calculate your keyword ratio for your article? Well Matt Cutts explains it a little bit here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rk4qgQdp2UA
Here is where I disagree with Matt. Many people try to talk about ALL their services on one page. And yes, you can talk about your services you offer in a normal human way without confusing anyone and talk about all 10 of your products and services constructively on the same page. Yes, the search engines see this. But the problem is, when you want to rank for one product, or one service and yet you are talking about 10 different services on one page. Which keyword gets the value? I guarantee you if your article is on many items or topics, it will not show up in the search engines as much as it would if you focused on one thing.
Our recommendation is keep your keyword density to 3% or less. You can use this tool here to see your ratio as you begin writing. http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/
Keep in mind, your first duty is to your reader. Figure out what the goal of your article will be. How do you want to lead your reader? Do you want your article to produce an action at the end of it? Will your article help not only your target audience but anyone beyond that? Perhaps your article is for a service? It would be important to describe who needs your services, what they get with your services and then offer a call to action at the end of the article to encourage others to contact you about said service. Or perhaps your article is about a product. In that case you would want to provide lots of high quality pictures, product descriptions and specs and what specials you are running. Whatever you are writing about, unless its just for pure informational purposes, you need to have an end goal and that is how you would write your article.
The final step in creating a world class article is in the formatting and adding in those final SEO tricks to optimize your article. Simply put, formatting relates to the items that you bold, underline, italicize and add color to. These draw the users eyes as well as letting the search engines know what you are emphasizing. This brings more relevance to your articles and makes for a better read for your target audience. If you notice, all of these techniques have been used within this article.
Depending on your website and what content management system you use, the CSS options available for your website and the skill of your webmaster, you can also add in text outlining to showcase a note as we do in this article and maybe arrows for your bullet points for that extra visual flair. These little things go a long way in getting your users to read the entire article and then share your article once they are done. The more visually attractive the article, the better chance it has to be shared.
Advanced SEO Masters can add in bookmarks at the top of your article. It is like a quick index. They click an item in your index and it drops them down to that place in your article. You can also add link title tags to these anchors which the search engines really like.
Pyramid Linking - This is simply highlighting your main keyword (the perfect SEO article) and linking back to your home page. We always recommend linking back from any article you write to your home page.
Calls to action - Once they get to the bottom of your article, what do you want them to do? Wouldn't you agree that the bottom of the article is the perfect place to ask your viewer to do something? We use the same call to action on all of our pages. We suggest they comment on the article, share the article, get a quote or simply ask us a question. Good Luck!
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