How to Write the Perfect SEO Optimized Article Step by Step Guide

Why SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is sometimes classified as the holy grail of internet marketing, the role of modern search engines notably Google in driving traffic to web pages, sites and documents is very vital. This has prompted major webmasters to turn their attention to the techniques of SEO, which includes Analytics, Page Optimization, Link Building among others. Basically the definition of SEO according to webopedia states that “SEOis short forsearchengineoptimization.Search engine optimization is a methodology of strategies, techniques and tactics used to increase the amount of visitors to awebsiteby obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of asearch engine(SERP)—including Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines.”

In recent years SEO has become indispensable to the survival of internet based businesses. An important but quite overlooked aspect of SEO is content marketing. Content marketing might actually hold the entire key to unravel the mystery behind SEO and its myths. It is an open secret in the internet business sphere that “the higher the quality of your content the more relevance is being placed on your website and brand by search engines”. How does this work? It’s quite simple; people search the internet to look for information, when they type into a search engine like Google, it will return a list of linked documents containing the keywords typed into the search engine toolbar, culled from various sources over the internet. The tricky part of the whole process is how the search engine gets to know how relevant a document is to a particular search query n order to rank it in its search result. The search engine does this by examining the contents of each document and comparing against a number of factors that enforces quality/ proves the value of a document in relation to the subject matter.

These factors include

- The number of external documents linking to the document from trusted and authority sources

(Backlinks)

- The click through rate, e.t.c.

That being said, it is important to note that the first thing that gets a website or page indexed on a search engine is the content of that website or page, all other factors being equally important, but secondary.


How to Optimize Content

In order to get your content noticed and ranked high by the search engines you have to provide VALUE. How then can you do this, the following guidelines will help you gain a basic understanding on what to do in creating high-quality content

Choosing a Topic

Find an interesting and preferably controversial topic in your niche, it might be an how-to guide, it might be a review, a sales copy or just about anything that you’re interested in. Whatever topic you choose make sure it’s addressing and providing solutions to a problem being faced by a certain target audience that you want to reach out to.

Keyword Research

This aspect is very important; your keywords are the first to be noticed by search engines while matching the search queries with documents on the internet. What you need to do is to use a “Keyword Research/Analysis Tool” to know which keywords best suits the topic at hand and how they can be tweaked to achieve better results. There a number free and paid keyword research tools on the internet the most being Google AdWords Keyword Planner which is free and has tons of features. How to do Keyword Research and Keyword Research in 2017 are two sources where you can read about Keyword Research in full.

Create Outline and Develop Points

This shouldn’t be hard to do. Since you already know the topic and you have chosen the keywords for your article, all you have to do now is develop your content and structure it around your pre-chosen keywords. Firstly divide your article into sessions and sub-topics; each session should talk about a specific aspect of your write-up. The most commonly preferred format goes like this


· Introduction

· Body

· Closing

The body can further be divided into sub-parts since it will contain the majority of the information being shared in your article.

For example, if you were writing an article about “traveling to Hollywood” you could divide the body into different parts like

· The best periods of the year to visit Hollywood

· Little info about the suburbs surrounding Hollywood

· How to prepare for travel

· The best places to visit in Hollywood, and so on

The content of the body largely depends on how creative you can get.

Write the Article

Utilizing the structure established while creating the outline, you’ll develop your points into completion and churn out a well written article consisting of the keywords you want to rank for. It is however crucial not to overuse your keywords too much in the article as this could send the wrong signal to the search engine and make it think you were trying to manipulate search results.

Tips for Using Keywords

· Do not use more than four times in the entire article unless it is really necessary

· Use keywords in your meta tags and page title

Link Building and Promotion

After writing and publishing the article, the next step is to promote it by sharing the link on several outlets related to your niche such as forums, blogs through commenting, directories and social media.

The more external sources linking to your article the higher it will rank in search results.

There you have it. The most important factor in ranking on top of search results is the amount of value your article provides readers, so by all means ensure the quality of your work is not mundane.