Article Writing SEO 101 – Fundamental Tips

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

Article Writing SEO 101: Keyword Research

We won’t go too deep into this topic here, but you should keep in mind that no matter how well written your articles are, they are useless if you haven’t done your research and chosen effective keywords. What is an effective keyword? It’s one that balances decent search demand with little competition.

In other words, you might 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 is no point in ranking well for something that no one is looking for.

On the other hand, it doesn’t make much sense to go after keywords with high search volumes, as they typically have huge competition, which will take years of work to even make a dent.

Your goal is to find the happy middle ground: keywords that are easy enough to rank well for and will also generate a decent amount of traffic.

Article Writing SEO 101: Keyword Placement

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

Once you know it’s the main keyword, there are a few places it should appear. If you are 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 title in the body of the text. Many SEOs will argue endlessly that certain META tags no longer count, but there’s certainly nothing wrong with including your keyword there. Also, the HTML page’s filename must include your keyphrase, separated by hyphens.

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

SEO Article Writing 101: Keyword Density

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

A Word of Caution 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 on the internet that doesn’t provide any value to humans – they exist just to please search engines.

This is pretty ridiculous from a business perspective, because it’s human readers who are going to monetize for you and buy your products or services. I have never had a search engine spider for a client. This is why you need to consider the needs of the human reader beyond the SEO elements. Put no more junk on the internet – provide content that offers value first and foremost, optimize it properly and the monetary rewards will follow.

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