Articles are pretty cool right? They can range from fun stories and news updates to insightful and educational pieces of text. Writing and stories are cool and fun in general, but what about online articles made and written specifically for search engines? What is the best way to go about writing yourself a SEO article that will both help bring in traffic and please our Google overlords. Why are keywords so important and how can we best utilize them?
Well, find out by continuing to read this SEO article about how to write optimized articles and why keywords are so important.
What is an SEO article?
First things first, what IS a SEO article and how does it differ from other articles you might find on the internet? The main general difference would be that search engine optimized articles have very specific content, specific phrases and keywords implemented through out the article. Where as the more “normal” article and content writers can write more freely and more creatively, without having to worry too much about inserting certain keywords and phrases in their article.
SEO Writing typically means you start your article with a goal in mind; which is to have the article help you gain more traffic and ultimately more conversions. Where as your more normal content writers will have the freedom to write something more focused…or pretty much anything they want.
There are no rules when it comes to writing something you just feel like writing and sharing with the internet. But for an SEO article, rules must be closely followed in order to achieve positive results.
It’s difficult to give you an example between the two, as everyone has a different writing style and method of writing and there’s a big contextual difference too. But, we can give you the usual and typical guideline that a writer tends to follow when writing an article specifically for SEO purposes.
Keywords
Surprised? Keywords are extremely important (arguably the most important) when it comes to writing SEO articles. Have you guessed or noticed what particular keywords I have been using in this article?
So, a quick and brief explanation of what a keyword is and what a keyword does: Keywords, also sometimes known as keyphrases are words and/or terms that are purposefully added into a piece of online content in order to improve search ranking on a search engine. Without keywords, it makes your content and/or website much harder to find. There are variants of keywords, here are some examples of the more popular ones;
- Short-tail: as the name suggests, is a short keyword! “SEO Articles” could be considered a short tail keyword
- Long-tail: again as the name suggests, this one is a long keyword phrase. “How to write optimized SEO articles” could be considered a long-tail keyword
- Geo-targeting: geo as in geography and targeting as in…well, targeting. Keywords that target a specific location, for example: “SEO writers in London”, would be considered as a geo-targeting keyword.
- Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI): LSI keywords are basically keywords that are closely related to other keywords you are trying to target, or keyphrases that are thematic with the targeted keywords. Eg; “Which companies hire the best SEO engineers?”
As you can see, keywords can be quite diverse in their type. But no matter which variant, keywords and key phrases are always important. Now that we’ve discussed some of the different variants of keywords, let’s quickly discuss how a keyword may be chosen. As you’ve probably already guessed, it’s all about the metrics and statistics! Keywords and key phrases are typically chosen based on their performance.
What does that mean? Well, how well is the keyword performing? How much search volume does it have and what is the keyword difficulty? Let’s take a quick look at the below screencap.
As you can see, the keyword; “article seo checker” has a monthly average search volume of 600, but it has quite a high “keyword difficulty”. So for most people writing an article and are looking for a keyword, this may not be a good option for them. On the other hand, the keyword “seo article writing” has both a higher search volume and a lower keyword difficulty and thus is probably a better choice for those looking to insert a “seo articles” related keyword into their article.
KWFinder is a brilliant tool that we use for keyword research. Read our “Top 4 SEO Tools We Pay For” article and learn all about KWFinder.
Placement
Does it really matter where you place keywords within the article and the amount of keywords that is placed? The short answer; yes.
Do you throw in a couple of keywords for every 1000 words? Or do you try and mass place your article with as many keywords as possible? Well, the exact number of keywords placed within an article is widely debated, the general agreement is around 4 or 5 keywords for every 1000 words. Of course this will differ depending on who you ask, but that is the general consensus. Where you place the keywords within your article will also matter a little too.
You don’t want to be flooding just 1 paragraph with all of your intended keywords. The general practice is to try and spread our your keywords; placing 1 keyword for every 200 words. It’s not an exact science as there are so many factors that come into play when it comes to keywords, articles and content. But hopefully this article has given you a good idea of where to start and how you should go about with your content and keywords.
That is the gist of keywords. Of course there are other important aspects of SEO content writing, such as the content length, content relevancy and the use of images, titles and tags. But we’ll leave that for another article. Remember, you don’t need to be doing all of the hard work. Find good online SEO tools to use and have them do the work for you!
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