Before you start thinking about any SEO article writing you need to focus on keywords where you can get onto the first page of any search results.
You need to know your competitors and what you have to do to beat them.
Google’s Adsense keyword tool gives you a great start. You can enter a word and the tool gives you 800 related search terms. It also gives you an indication of how much those keywords will pay you (the competition bar). Clicking on any of the 800 keywords gives you the Google search page forthat keyword. You just have to check out the 10 sites onthat page to see if you could hope to knock any of them off that top spot.
If any of the first page of search results are blog posts or articles from ezines or hubpages then you have a good chance of displacing them.
You really need to know a bit more than that though. I use Market Samurai and bought the program, but I am not going to give you a referral link or anything like that. MS really is a superb program and the only way I have found to really suss out your competition quickly.
So, basically, you start by deciding which keywords you stand a chance with.
SEO article writing is what you need to practice if you want your articles to be found in Google. Everyone who writes articles for money should be constantly looking at ways to improve the SEO of their article writing.
SEO Article Writing – Step By Step
This article approaches SEO from the very beginning. It is essential to understand how search engines work and why you should forget the idea of $30 click keywords.
What is SEO Article Writing?
SEO, Search Engine Optimization, is what writers do to persuade search engines to rank articles higher.
SEO Article Writing is where search engine optimization techniques are applied to writing an article (200-3000 words). The writer is trying to convince Google that the article should rank at the top of its search results.
Where Do You Need SEO Article Writing?
You need to be constantly thinking of search engine optimisation factors wherever you write online. If you want to earn money from ads on your articles, lots of people need to see them. The only way that will happen is if your article gets onto page 1 of Google’s search results.
You need to be thinking about SEO article writing when you are writing blog posts and forum posts, too, if you want any of the search engines to find them. The big three, Google, Yahoo and Bing all rank an article higher if it is optimized for their spiders to read.
Why Do You Need to Improve Your SEO Article Writing?
Large amounts of money change hands as website owners pay SEO companies to get them to the top of Google’s search results. Some companies charge $2,000 a month, just to get you in the top five! SEO professionals have analysed how search engines, especially Google, rank different articles and websites.
Titbits of SEO knowledge fall to the ground and have become general knowledge amongst website owners, who use these to improve their own search engine ranking. More and more website owners use these search engine optimization techniques, so the chances of a high search engine ranking without using SEO techniques falls.
Improve your SEO if you are serious about earning money, or forget the whole business, because everyone else is improving theirs and your website or articles will soon be buried.
How Do You Improve the SEO of Your Article Writing?
To be totally upfront, nobody actually knows, except a handful of employees at Google. People have statistical analyses, showing this and that will improve your search engine ranking and that is what people preach as good SEO technique.
Google also changes its rules every six months or so, just to confuse everyone even more. They do this because of the way webmasters game the system; Google only wants “natural” search results and dislikes the idea of people artificially getting their websites higher than they “should be”.
How does Google decide what results to show?
Google’s has three sets of customers:
- People who search
- Businesses that buy advertizing space
- website owners who sell advertizing space
The three groups are linked, because Google sells space on its results pages to advertisers. Google also places ads on websites for businesses and takes a cut of any advertizing income.
Google tries to present a searcher with a perfect set of results. Perfect results are pages that match up to whatever the Searcher was looking for.
All the search engines use software to analyze every web page on the Internet. It uses the analysis results to work out which pages match to a searcher’s needs the best.
SEO is about convincing Google that your page has what the searcher is looking for.
You need to decide which searchers you are going to target with your article.
How Do You Decide Which Searchers to Target?
Some searchers are more profitable than others. This is because advertizers will pay more to put their ads in front of certain searchers. Advertizers will pay $30 a click to show their ads to some searchers.
There are five parts to deciding which searchers to target with your SEO article:
- How many searchers there are looking for a particular piece of knowledge
- How much advertizers will pay to place their ads in front of those searchers
- How many other websites are already competing for those searchers
- Whether you can get onto the first page of search results
- How likely those searchers are to click on Google’s ads
1 & 2 The Google Adsense free keyword tool will tell you this
3 If you click on any item in the left column of the results the Adense keyword tool gives you, you can see which websites are top of Google’s search results. You can also use the allintitle: Your Keyword Phrase command to see the number of competing sites that use your keyword phrase in their title.
4 You need to decide if you can compete with the sites that are on page 1 of Google’s results. You need data to help you assess your chances. Download Google’s toolbar. This will give you the Page Rank of every website you visit.
If all your competitors are PR 3 and above, then forget that search term, similarly if they are all .edu and .gov sites, choose another search term and start again.
5 If there is an article page already on page 1 of the search results then you have a chance, you can compete with blogs and article sites. The only tool I know of that will tell you the likelihood of searchers clicking is Market Samurai. This software has a free trial, so download it and do all your research during your trial. It also gives you the information from all 5 points in one table.
If you want to start without Market Samurai you can use a simple rule of thumb; People click on ads on review articles and articles that solve urgent problems. Articles that provide all the information get few clicks. Information articles get few clicks.
It is only once you have chosen a keyword phrase that you have a chance with that you can even start looking at SEO.
There are two parts of search engine optimization; On Page SEO and Off Page SEO.
How Do You Improve Your On Page Article SEO?
- Use your keyword phrase in your title
- Use your keyword phrase in H1 & H2 sub headings, twice
- Use your keyword scattered through your article, but only as often as reads naturally. Use a few instances where your keyword phrase is broken up, but still in the same order
- Use synonyms for your keyword scattered through your article
- Use related terms that Google expects to see, eg This article is largely about Google, but I have included “Yahoo” and “Bing” in it as well
- If you use images, use Titles and Alt Text that include your keyword
- Use your keywords in your page or post description and tags
How Do You Improve Your Off Page SEO?
- Get Links to your article from bookmark sites like She Told Me, You Say Too and Post Your Own
- Get links into your article from sites that accept short articles like Info Pirate, Fuelspace, Snipsly
- Get links into your article from RSS feeds like feedage.com
- Get links to your article from social networking sites
- Get links into your article from forum signatures. Play an active role in the forum and never spam, or you will just be banned
- Get links into your article by commenting on related blogs. Comment, never spam
- Get links into your article by guest posting on blogs