Julian Price

How to Write an Article for SEO Results - Titles, Keywords and Unique Website Content



Posted: Friday, February 11, 2011

by Julian Price
http://www.uk-freelance-content-writer.co.uk/

If you are writing an article and you intend to submit it somewhere on the internet and your main goal is to see it found and then ranked well on the pages of search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing etc, then there are crucial things you need to remember.

The following tips are not guaranteed to bring your articles success but they will give them a better chance of being noticed.

1. Titles – The first thing anyone sees of your articles, including the search engines, is the title. The temptation with article titles is to make them clever or perhaps even witty, but trust me; Google doesn’t care how funny your title is, unless it’s on the subject of comedy. You see as far as search engines are concerned, the clearer your article title the better. Consider how you search the internet yourself when you are looking for something specific. I could have made my title simply, “How to write articles” but this would have been very vague and could get lost amongst thousands of other ‘articles about articles’. By adding what sort of articles (for SEO results) we are trying to write, narrows the search down immediately.

2. Title Length – Many experts will tell you that the first 3 or 4 words of your title are the most important. This is true but many titles simply wouldn’t make sense in just a few words, but you do need to try and get your most important keywords as close to the beginning of the title as possible. However, a longer title, often referred to as a longtail keyword may yield better results. For example “article writing” would be classed a short tail keyword whereas; “Article Writing for Google SEO” would be considered a longtail keyword. Adding extra keywords, providing they make sense in your title, will give your article a greater chance of being found for multiple key phrases.

3. Relevant Keywords for Relevant Content – If this article was now about fishing, it would be fair to say that I completely misled you with my title, so that is something to completely avoid. Web search engines such as Google and Yahoo will penalise your article if your content isn’t relevant to your title. Your title should tell visitors as clearly as possible what they will find in the article content.

4. Niche Content and Expert Content – If you are an expert in a certain area, then the authority with which you speak will be valued by Google and co and your content is likely to be assessed accordingly. If you are an expert in an area that is considered niche, then your chance of success improve still further. Write about what you know and write it as well as you can. Constructive, coherent, relevant, niche content will be rewarded. So, if possible, find yourself an article niche for better results.

5. Posting your Niche Articles – If you have a niche website or any website for that matter that is already indexed by the search engines and receiving some decent traffic, then most experts would say that posting your best website content on your own site would give you the most value. However, if your website is new and barely troubling the top pages of Google, it may be worth looking for somewhere else to post your article or content in order to drive some traffic to your site. Perhaps another website similar to yours will be willing to use your content in return for some onsite acknowledgement, preferably in the shape of links within the body of your content. Article publishing directories are another option but you need to be very careful that these directories don’t take all the value for themselves. Look for publishers with a high Google page rank; find out if their articles get re-distributed elsewhere with your links intact.

6. Re-writer or Rewriting Your Content – Now, I suggest you only do this with your own content, as re-writing someone else’s content, although widespread, isn’t particularly ethical. If you re-write and re-word your own content, not only can you be assured of its quality but you also know the only person you are plagiarising is yourself! To maintain quality, do the re-writing yourself. There are pieces of software that claim to be able to do this for you, but I have found them all pretty cumbersome and time consuming. Make sure the re-write is comprehensive, as even your own content rewritten will be penalised as duplicate if it’s not different enough.
Julian has diplomas in freelance journalism (with distinction), copywriting and proofreading. He is also a creative writer and poet who writes both professionally and for pleasure. Julian has written articles for an internet marketing company and although this medium is often restricted by topic, his writing still maintains a unique and often humourous style, with many of his articles achieving good results on search engines. He has found the discipline involved with this kind of work to be a great writing exercise and believes it enhances and improves other areas of his writing. Julian is becoming an established freelance writer and many of his articles here at searchwarp are a showcase of the variety and quality of his work.

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