Are you wondering how to write great SEO articles that don’t detract from your creativity and the information you want to share? The world of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) can often feel big and scary (despite being abbreviated down to just 3 letters). For many clients it’s the elephant in the room that they just don’t want to address. But, much like everything (especially in the mystical world of blogging), once explained and broken down, you’ll find yourself feeling giddy with how easy it is to write great SEO articles. Here’s our 6 simple hacks for great SEO articles.
Key Words
Once you’ve decided what your article is about the key words are simply the topic of what you’re writing about, in relation to how people will search for it. In more basic terms; keywords are those that relate to your content and the way in which people will find it -it might be easier to remember them as key search terms.
Think about who your article is for and what terms (key words) they will be using in order to find your article. Once you’ve decided on what your key words are the density and how often you use them in your article is also very important. Your content will rank considerably higher if you use your key words in at least 10% of your article as well as your SEO title, SEO Meta Description and URL.
When it comes to creating a great SEO article you basically want to post-it note your entire article so that crawlers (search engine review bots) have clearly defined, descriptive flags to help them organise and file your content into their search engines. Essentially you want your article added to the search engine filing cabinet, but not lost under a mass of miscelaneous content!
Try sites like ‘Answer the Public‘ to research what the key search terms are considered to be for the type of article you’re about to write.
Word Count
With great SEO articles comes great content responsibilities. Unlike social media where content tends to be quick and easy for a viewer to digest, the best ranking blog posts and great SEO articles now tend to be what’s often referred to as ‘long form’. Coming in at a minimum of 1500 words, longform articles educate and offer a good amount of information and value. You definitely never want your article to be less than 600 words, quite a leap from 5 years ago when the standard word count volume needed per article sat at around 300-600 words.
Take Rank Math for example who will score your content based on its length using the followingreference guide:
- More than 2500 words: 100% score
- 2000-2500 words: 70% score
- 1500-2000 words: 60% score
- 1000-1500 words: 40% score
- 600-1000 words: 20% score
- Below 600 words: 0% score
It’s quite a big jump though isn’t, from 300 to plus 1500 words?! This is because Google favours useful information; it’s search engine is only as good as good as the content it ranks to its front pages. An increasingly difficult task as year on year as online user numbers climb. More users equating to a greater competition in the ranking stakes for quality of content. As a content creator if you want great SEO articles you need to strive to be within the best ranked articles at least some of the time.
All search engines consider articles with the most information (and content types) to be one of the highest values to readers searching the topics that great SEO articles fall under. However, there are roughly 2.75 million blogs articles posted every day so don’t expect all your content to rank all of the time!
In recent years blog content and articles generally had seemed to be considered outdated. With a mass of information online, videos capture a viewers attention and inform them quickly. However, the information they can provide is limited and so blogs have been making a steady come back as they offer a way in which to incorporate multiple blocks of varied educational content.
For great SEO articles make sure to break your information down into easily digested paragraphs, book ended with descriptive images and micro videos. Why not try creating and embedding some Youtube shorts into your next article to make Google extra happy!
Use Power Words
It is true; words do empower people and great SEO articles too!
‘A simple rule of copywriting is to evoke emotions. If we were talking about pizza, we would tell you how soft the bread is, how wonderful it smells, how the toppings look and taste… You should aim to do the same with the title.’ – Rank Math
All great SEO articles use power words. But what does that mean exactly? Well, you want to capture a potential reader’s attention as quickly as possible. Would you have read this article if it claimed to share ways in which to write mediocre articles? Nope, yo just wouldn’t! The ‘great’ in great SEO articles, adds ‘power’ to the title, making it more appealing.
Don’t forget outside of your newsletters (we will come to these in another article), your articles are not delivered directly to the people they’re written for. More often than not a reader will need to search multiple keywords and phrases before they fall upon a list that your article is sat within. So, you want to stand out by using snappy, positive and powerful words in your title along with your keywords to sell your content and make it as clickable as possible.
It’s good to note however that your title word count is relatively short so you want to embody those key and power termss in as few, but relevant words as possible.
Size is Important
That is at least for title and sub header fonts of great SEO articles! As a rule, you want to be using H1 heading tags for titles and H2 subheading tags for sub headers. Why is this important for search engine optimisation? It’s a valid question and one which the answer might not seem obvious to, if you’re a creative writer new to digital publishing.
H2 header tags help to break down great SEO articles to make them a lot easier to read and more easily scannable. Not just by human readers but also by search engine bots that break down content for ranking and placing into the search engines readers use to find your articles in the first place. Similarly, H1 tags should be used for page titles. Containing your articles keywords your page title is vital for search engine crawlers whose complicated task is to go through your content and categorise it.
Image Alt Text
Alt being a shortened version of alternative. So called alt tags and alt descriptions, alt text of the images in your articles are hugely useful for making your article (and it’s images) both SEO friendly and accessible to all. As well as helping search engines, that essentially want to crawl through, group and rank all content within your content (think inception vibes), Image text helps screen-reading tools to describe images to visually impaired readers, and in turn opening your article up to an even wider audience.
With all of this taken in to account, when writing alt text for images make sure to describe the purpose of an image and not make your descriptions too complex. Great SEO articles are made and formulated not just written so that they can be found and consumed in a variety of ways.
Include Links
Once you’ve captured someone on your website you want to keep them within your network. Including both internal and external links within your article will not only increase the value of your article according to the standards of search engines such as Google, it will also help to move the reader on to more of your content, increasing your views across all your content sources.
Look for existing articles you’ve written that are relevant to the article you’re currently writing and link it in with an internal backlink. Next include links to content on your social media sites, that you feel will offer additional, useful information to the reader. This way you’re creating added value without losing the reader. Remember for this to truly work you also need to be linking back to your blog within your social media posts too! Doing so will help create a net so that as you share more articles, they gradually become easier and easier for more people to find as you begin to target new and old followers or viewers.
Collaborating with other bloggers is a great way to increase your net as well as your DA (Domain Authority) and DR (Domain Ranking). Activities such as this help search engines review your blog are as a useful online resource. Articles from highly ranked blogs will more often than not do better than articles from lower ranking blog sites. So why not suggest doing like for like features with some of your blog friends and contacts.
What Next?
Once you’ve mastered these 6 simple hacks to great SEO articles, don’t stop there. There are so many ways to help improve the content you are creating. For novices we suggest using plugins like Yoast or Rank Math which are great for marking your content so you can see just how SEO friendly they are. They also offer user friendly guidance for improvement which can take articles from average to great SEO articles in a matter of minutes. These plug ins can be accessed at varying levels both paid for and free. Our advice; exhaust those free resources as much as you can first, before signing up or subscribing!
How do you write great SEO articles? Share your tips and findings for the Blogga community in the comments below.
View this post on Instagram
If you liked this article you might also like our Instagram post on tips for getting your reels to trend from featured influencer ‘Welsh Mummy Steph’. To be featured on the blog or in our reels hack series why not drop us an email: info@bloggamamas.com