You may be a great writer, but if you don’t write your web articles in a way that is SEO-friendly, you may be merely talking to yourself online, without any readers except for your mom. So how do you write articles that are interesting, but that also have great search engine optimization, making them come up towards the top of search results for the topic? Here are some tips to write an SEO-friendly article:

Use a catchy headline with your main keyword in it:

You should write a headline that wants people to click on your article. Keep in mind that the headline will do more than anything else to sell your piece. Also make sure that you have relevant keywords in the article that will get people searching for that keyword to find it. For example, if you are writing about life insurance for seniors, use that keyword in the title.

Use keywords in the article:

You don’t want to stuff your article with keywords – Google may penalize you for that – but you should use the keyword that your article is about in the first sentence of your article, as well as a few times later on in the piece.

Write quality articles:

Spinning content that already has been written is unacceptable. The same goes with writing poorly-written articles that are filled with spelling and grammatical errors. You will lose credibility with your readers – and potentially with search engines – with sloppy work. Instead, write interested, well-written articles that are of high quality.

Use shorter paragraphs:

Remember how you learned in school about writing paragraphs, and how sentences related to the same subject should be in the same paragraph, even if the paragraph could end up being many sentences long? Forget that rule when it comes to web writing. Shorter paragraphs are easier to read on the web. If you have a 10-sentence long paragraph, people will stop reading.

Break up your article with subheads and bullet points:

Along those lines, using subheads and/or bullet points can help make your article easier to scan and digest. In addition, people can easily see what the important points are in your piece.

Don’t write too long – or too short:

Depending on the topic, you should aim for between 400-600 words. You can write a little longer than that if the topic demands it, but don’t go over 800 or 900 words.

Use links where relevant:

When it comes to performance based SEO, publishing relevant links will help boost the credibility of your article.

Share your articles:

If you share your articles in social media, you can potentially boost their SEO, as well as increase your audience and add traffic to your website.

Evidence has been building up, however, that remotely related and even content not related at all can actually help your site’s rankings rise.

Whether from videos gone viral, advertising campaigns or even known meme macros. They can all sway search engines towards pumping up your ranking.

“Why” is a good question, “how” though, is a better one

Brand Management

For images or videos strengthening ones brand marketplace position, the simple measure of relevance and context is next to impossible

Only in the most crude way can search engines read such media, as such they aren’t in a position to decide if any brand value is attached to them so they have to look at patterns, at ways these pieces of media are linked by people towards your site. It’s then an educated guess (a highly educated one) as to how the concerned media is relevant to your content.

A viral video will be shared here, there and everywhere, those links will tell search engines that in some way, it relates to your brand. Even if it was just a mere trinket whipped up by the marketing team that morning, it appears to be yours. Due to that, and due to all the natural and easy links that roll in because of it, to search engine eyes: your brand is somehow important.

Reputation

Another vaguely related way your SEO can be helped is by showing Google your sites’ fame. Folks are enjoying and engaging with you? They are trusting and endorsing you more than a site without the same quantity of links coming in?

People like you? Good enough reason to include your site as a search result. The search result will surely be liked as well.

 
The Unknown factors

Truly great content that can’t always be picked up by search engines has some elements to it.

Ask yourself what a Hugo Boss ad transcript means for a server cluster. Could it even be able to tell that the advert was for Hugo Boss?

Sometimes, content truly doesn’t matter because it’s providing something to the reader cannot be found on search engines, which have to allow for this or end up disregarding thousands of very relevant results simply because they failed to see why the most interesting man in the world was related with Dos Equis beer.

In Conclusion

Reduced to its absolute basics, great quality viral and non-related (or remotely connected) content, whether on or off-site, can nevertheless improve SEO due to search engine limitations. Intangibles such as tone or irony cannot be picked upon and there is only a fairly crude brand presence notion.

To compensate for this, certain forms of remotely-related content get a “best guess” label value.

Your whole SEO strategy should not rely uniquely on content like this!

Related, quality-rich, informative material, regular online usability trial and error remains the way to go in a rock-solid SEO campaign…Yet fun, less related content may also have a fair impact on your rankings.

The world of SEO has become a rather dynamic animal. It’s become imperative for both business and individual site owners to stay on top of a fast moving SEO environment. If you don’t, your website could quickly end up on the side of the road.

Continuous Change

 Search Engine Optimization professionals need to be aware of the constantly changing rules and guidelines that are put in place by Google. Site owners and blog owners have been surprised in recent months due to Google’s strict policy of not tolerating “followed links” that distort the ranking information. You need to stay abreast of the ever changing SEO space. At least keep your eyes on key developments like: Panda, Penguin, EMD (Exact Match Domain), and the Disavow Tool. You are aware of these, right? What did penguin target again? Google generally updates their problem solving procedures (algorithms) without warning, but more recently there have been advisories. Take note.

Panda

First released in February of 2011 by Google, with the goal of lowering the rank of thin sites to allow quality sites to rise in search. There have been several updates since, and Google provided 23 attributes of a high-quality site so you’re not out in the dark.

Penguin

Penguin hit in April of 2012, and was aimed to penalize sites using black-hat techniques including: cloaking, keyword stuffing, link schemes, and duplicate content.

EMD (Exact Match Domain)

Google announced in September (2012) that low-quality EMD’s would be reduced in search results. Prior to this, having an exact domain was quite beneficial to that search irregardless if the content inside was garbage. That has change. The algo affected less than 1% of US-English queries.

Disavow Tool

This tool was released so website owners could remove links pointing to their site which were using techniques outside of Google’s guidelines. Make sure you site is registered at Google’s Webmaster Tools.

Link Building & Keywords

Link Building is still very important to the overall SEO equation, but the Wild Wild West days have vanished. That’s a good thing, it levels the playing field. The other important way to increase your page ranking is the use of appropriate “keywords”. The key is to be natural in your writing. Going back after you completed your article and sticking a word or phrase in ten different places will be of no value moving forward. Excess keyword insertion may have worked before, but now appropriate and relevant keywords are required. Your post is not a Turkey, stop stuffing keywords.

Choosing an SEO Company

 Due to the constant change in search engine optimization in ingenious ways, new updates can cause complications. As a business, you can’t afford to take these hits. Stay away away from link schemes. You need to choose a reputed company that has an established track record to manage your SEO. This will ensure that your company will not face problems when other companies are struggling to regain their Google page ranking. A good SEO company can offer good advice on the number and frequency of links and keywords. If you’re on a tight budget, or have no budget, you should be able to keep pace by following the 3 sites below.

SEOmoz – One of the leading SEO sites out there with a fantastic blog that always provides valuable content. A must for anyone that wants to keep with pace with fast moving SEO world.

Matt Cutts – Matt is head of Google’s Webspam team. Matt provides key information on Google/SEO and has posted 542 articles on the topic. Be sure to follow him on Google + as well for further insight.

Search Engine Land – Led by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land provides news, insight, and best practices for SEO, SEM, and Social Media.

Social Sharing Optimization

It even has its own acronym (SSO). Whether you’re a SMB or individual, you have to put yourself out there on the social network train. You need to pickup your activity and engagement levels on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and the larger social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon. You need to dive into Google Plus head first. Google is hitting you over the head to use their social network. You need to listen. A shift is in progress, and traditional SEO could be headed to hospice sooner than you think.

The Future of SEO

Good search engine optimizers know that the SEO landscape is rapidly changing and is not the same as in previous years. Campaign planning must take into consideration the current realities when launching a new product or service. For successful campaigns, a multi pronged approach is required. This would ensure that the website does not incur penalties or lose visitor traffic .Today most customers like to control the decisions because they are aware of and more critical of marketing techniques.

Now customers need the best options. With customers exercising such control, businesses now have to adopt effective SEO strategies. This requires producing a steady stream of content that appropriately addresses the needs of the customers.

Create solid content and get it in front of your audience using social. Keep building relationships, and don’t stop. The shares, likes, and comments will follow leading to better search results of your content.

SEO: The Challenge

A catchy title is among the sure bets to insure that content to be read or shared on social networks has any chance of going viral. Its value can be found not only in keywords you’ll use, but also in its influence and how shareable it can be.

When they refer to SEO titles, content writers usually have in mind a keyword-rich text line designed to rank in Google as well as other major search engines. However, sole keyword density-density ranking is now obsolete & past-dated SEO. Search engines are now taking other factors into consideration for content ranking…not just keywords. Popularity, authority, influence along with reliability top the list.

The information highway now contains an endless amount of awesome articles with great titles yet these don’t rank well and can’t even be found. The major part of these can be found on new sites or sites (visited and shared on the social media world) enough to be not deemed popular enough to be considered influential. The content there isn’t any less reliable, only less authoritative in search engine eyes.

To rise to these new SEO challenges, becoming an authority is what you need to do in order to achieve that extra mile to generate interesting content worth sharing. Your title is what will generate the most attention.

Short and Sweet!

If it can’t be said in one breath, then it’s too long. Length matters: a catchy title is a short one. It grabs attention, is easy to read and to recall. Online, your title is a line, a lure and what you need to draw visitors to your site. Display in search engines is usually restricted to 70 characters, often less so even in an SEO context, titles must be short.

For Twitter sharing, headlines must be short enough to permit URLs, user names, #hash tags and beyond.

Titles, in order to go viral on Twitter, for example, need to be sufficiently short to be shared on Twitter along with the URL (full or shortened) and usernames. Titles on Facebook are displayed very similarly to those of a search engine, so length matters there too. Your title is too long? It will automatically get shortened to the character limit. Lengthy titles have a tendency to lose readers rather than drawing them in.

Irresistibility!

What’s in an irresistible header? That special something, that je-ne-sais-quoi that keeps your reader wanting more. Be feisty, use compelling words so that your title will echo. Bear in mind that past potent words are not as potent now. “Best”, “Great” have become obsolete however synonyms such as “epic”, “awesome” will draw more attention. Tease your audience if you must, keep them longing for more, make them want to return.

What does the reader gain?

“How to” titles always work…It doesn’t matter how redundant they may be. They hold a promise for the reader that the following article is packed with information that can be used. “How to” titles, however are not the only readers that can draw interest. Titles such as “top reasons” or “Ten things you need to know…” are still a hit so, if you can’t find anything more original, stick with what’s tried, tested and true but look to give it a creative spin through the use of unexpected words. Example: “Writing Sexy and viral SEO Titles” or “How to compose Compelling titles,” and the like.

Own it

Look to be as original as possible, even when following a formula. Pretending to be what you aren’t is deceptive. Remain honest and talk of what you know. Let your titles reflect that knowledge, to let your audience understand that you are the subject authority before they click to read further. A title that is clear, honest and good will reveal an article’s core. Be emphatic, be intriguing, never be deceptive.

Rather than concluding

General writing rules apply in most roles yet no industry is the same and it’s not just following a formula. Know your audience, build content towards that goal. Don’t write just to draw clicks, write to involve and to bring out the passion of your knowledge from your readers, make them see that the content you are sharing is prized.

You can speak about a topic that has already been spoken of by others, but contribute something new, something no one has thought about. But understand further that titles do not work alone. They must be followed by content that is also interesting – Long story short, it must deliver. Only they will visitors be converted into an engaged community that’s ready to share your material and that will acting like the true ambassadors of your brand.

A dark recess of cyberspace is not a place for a young start-up, let alone a business with a proven marketplace merit record. Wasting away on the fringes of cyberspace equals customers not finding your site and therefore not being aware of what you have to offer.

Meta tag keywords are no longer sufficient to attract viewers. The following are pointers set up to generate genuine results. What I recommend? Going through the list with your tech guy and ensure you have gone through all of them. Track the before and after results afterwards.

Populate keywords in a natural way.

SEO experts agree that loading with keywords the beginning of an article is part of the important steps to take. Keywords should be loaded naturally, not in any obvious or repeating. Writing something about the iPhone? Ensure you mention it upfront–don’t stuff the topic under the rug. Make certain that these same natural language keywords are redundant within tags.

Set content, let it age.

Content rules… the trick lies in ensuring that yours matches with what search engines are expecting. Articles need to be a minimum of 400 to 500 words. Smart crawlers will detect quality-rich content and weed out redundant, fake stuff. It’s also vital to let content age: editing and changing or adjustments means crawlers have to redo their job from scratch.

Claiming one’s Google authorship.

Once you begin generating fresh content, what you need to do next is make sure you’ve duly claimed your Google authorship. This is a Google+ feature where your G+ profile can be linked to the content produced on your site therefore making it easier for people to locate it. You can do this at: https://plus.google.com/authorship

Write content that’s linkable.

One of the best kept secrets to making certain your site is found is to encourage linking. The more your site is linked to, the more it will be found. Writing something convincing is the best way to stimulate linking: the review of a significant topic, an article on a myth or on a misunderstanding, adding to a social debate. People are drawn to content they like.

Block copycats.

Your material needs to be unique and original, Google and its brethren have little love for text located in more than one location. Copyscape.com detects if text on your website can be found anywhere else.

Be innovative.

Benchmark tricks of the trade include: Creating a blog, posting fresh content says think outside the box… “Contact us” can become a unique marketing line: “Get in touch with the best programmer known to cyberspace” Small things like that help your contact link be indexed. On many pages, a few bolded keywords can also go a long way.

Resolve common issues.

Many entrepreneurs create appealing websites with fresh content. There are, however, some simple tweaks which everyone look into. Business owners, ensure a robots.txt file that tells search engines what to do is found within your root folder. You also need an XML map, a sitemap. Finally, make sure your headings are descriptive: Don’t use something like “Samples” when “Free XYZ” samples can be used.

 Published on November 9, 2012

“Search engine optimization is extremely simple,” says Luke Matthews in a guest post at The Responsible Marketing Blog, “but the waters are constantly muddied by misinformation spread by wannabe experts and noobs who want to garner authority and respect.”

To help you navigate the SEO waters—and avoid the frequent riptides—Matthews created his own 10 Commandments of SEO.

Thou Shalt Reciprocate Link Love.

Inbound links are good; they tell search engines that your content is valuable. But it’s not polite to take without giving. When you receive links from high-quality sites, return the favor.

Thou Shalt Not Beg for Links.

You’ve just gotten an email from someone you don’t know asking for a link. Do you acquiesce? Probably not. But what if someone who leaves insightful comments at your blog, and links to your site, makes a similar request? In that scenario, you’ll probably oblige. And vice-versa.

Thou Shalt Find the Best Keywords.

Keywords that generate the most traffic aren’t your “best” keywords if that traffic doesn’t convert. Look instead for less competitive terms used by your target audience. It is “relatively easy to rank for these terms and 30 keywords each getting 50 searches per month adds to up to a lot of traffic,” notes Matthews.

Thou Shalt Not Write for Search Engines.

Google and Bing want content written for humans; you’ll impress search engines with a focus on readability and value.

The Point: Know what you shall and shall not do. If you want to avoid the wrath of a vengeful search engine, take serious heed of SEO best practices.

By Elle-Rose Williams, Published November 5, 2012

We all know the importance of being seen and heard online – after all, if you’re business isn’t succeeding online – there’s a chance it won’t catch on at all. Part of succeeding online and improving your online presence though is making sure your business can be found by those looking for it – and this means ranking well on search engines for the right terms and phrases. Whilst SEO (which stands for Search Engine Optimisation) is something that takes an entire strategy and takes time and effort to improve – there are some quick wins you can achieve easily and quickly that will help you start seeing results.

1. Improve your page-titles

All your web pages have titles and if you haven’t assigned your web page proper titles (as in: that include key words and phrases relating to that page) then you could be missing out on some helpful SEO. Make sure your page titles all have proper names – not just random generated numbers.

2. Guest Blog

If you have the time to – guest blog on a few neighbouring websites that are in similar niches and industries to your own. In these guest blog posts you can then link back to your own website – this is good for publicity first of all – but those links will help add to the authroity of your website. You can use this tool to open up multiple tabs at once – is you have lots of blogs in mind: www.urlopener.com/

3. Write your own blog

In general terms, websites producing fresh, unique content tend to rank higher than those who aren’t – so it’s always a good idea to regularly produce on-site content of your own. Make sure it’s original and make sure it’s well-written and interesting too. The easiest way to do this is to set up a blog on your site, but it could also take the form of a weekly news bulletin or something similar.

4. Encourage Product Reviews

If you’re running an ecommerce website – then make sure all your product pages have reviews on them – and make sure you’re actively encouraging your customers to write them too.

5. Monitor crawl errors with Google Webmaster Tools

Register your website with Google Webmaster Tools and monitor your website for crawl errors such as 404s. When they appear, make sure you go and fix them. If they build up over time it can be a signal to Google that your website is not maintained very well.

6. Sort out your server

Another mistake a lot of companies make is hosting their website with the wrong hosting agents. After all – if your website keeps going down your traffic will drop. You can compare and contrast different hosting packages using the tool Who Is Hosting This so you can find a package that suits you and your website.

Ray “Catfish” Comstock, October 26, 2012

I have been fortunate in my 14 year SEO career to work with a huge number of companies and I have seen many different implementations of an “SEO campaign.” I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t, especially at the enterprise level.

What follows are 10 lessons that I have learned over the years so that you might know what to watch out for as you run or manage your own SEO campaign. Hopefully you find the information valuable!

Lesson #1 – Don’t Ignore SEO Recommendations

Put another way, SEO recommendations need to be given their proper prioritization within the list of everything else your IT team is trying to accomplish for your website.

It’s important to recognize that most IT teams don’t have much visibility into analytics and don’t see how much traffic (and ultimately revenue) is created through organic search. Be sure to share this information with them along with the potential opportunity that search could bring to the site if it was better optimized. After all, the name of the game in this economy is revenue and you can’t make any if you don’t have customers.

Not to under value some of the other projects and activities that IT teams and web developers are engaged in, but few will have the same economic impact to a company that a top listing in Google will have for the right keywords.

Encourage your teams to prioritize the implementation of SEO recommendations and share the success of those recommendations once they are implemented.

Lesson #2 – Solve CMS Issues

You would think in the modern era that all CMS systems would be SEO friendly. Unfortunately this isn’t the case.

Make sure your CMS system is evaluated by an SEO professional to potentially identify problems like:

URL structures that cause duplicate content / difficult to index
Session IDs
JavaScript or Flash drop down menus that can’t be indexed
Lack of support for Custom Page Titles
Lack of support for rel=canonical tags
There are nearly 100 other potential site-wide technical issues that could cause issues with search engines. Make sure your CMS system is professionally evaluated for these issues as some of them can cause major problems with indexing and ranking.

Lesson #3 – Do Your Keyword Research (and Better Understand Your Users)

Keyword research is really user research that details how your customers are using language to describe your products, services, and content. Make sure you use the language that they are accustomed to.

It’s fine to sprinkle in your own marketing vernacular to steer the online conversation, but don’t ignore keywords you know people are using. I can’t tell you the number of times I have had to explain to people that while I appreciate their intentions in creating a narrative that maps to their marketing goals, they just can’t ignore keywords that are commonly used by their customers.

For example, it’s fine to say that you’re an auto repair shop, but you would be missing out on a huge potential search volume if you also didn’t optimize around the term “car repair”.

Additionally, make sure you have good segmentation between your brand and non-brand keywords and that you are constantly exploring your long tail performance, especially as it relates to uncovering new opportunities for additional keywords to target.

It’s fine to measure and optimize against highly competitive, marquee terms, but don’t allow those terms to dominate your focus to the point of only seeing the tip of the iceberg. Most enterprise SEO campaigns have huge traffic numbers that come from the aggregate of long tail terms. As a matter of fact, in many cases, those long tail terms the majority of organic search traffic.

Lesson #4 – Have a Strong Content Strategy

This is one of the hardest challenges that most companies face. If you want to be listed in the top of Google for a particular keyword, then you’re going to have to accept the fact that you have to publish strong, authoritative content that is relevant to that keyword on a consistent basis.

If you don’t have resources dedicated to this activity you will mostly likely lose out in the long run to your competition that does. It’s important to recognize that marketing hyperbole doesn’t usually qualify as strong, authoritative content.

You have to put yourself in a search engine’s shoes and really evaluate whether your content could be considered one of the top 10 resources in the entire world for users whose intent is to find information related to the keyword that you’re optimizing for.

Lesson #5 – Integrate Social Media With SEO

It’s no secret that social media has become much more important to search rankings recently. From social mentions to link building, you must integrate social media with your SEO efforts to succeed.

Ensuring that your social team understands what keywords you’re targeting and where those keywords are being targeted is a minimum. Integration of SEO best practices into blogging, tweeting, video production and sharing, social media platforms like Facebook and Pinterest as well as your own community platform are critical pieces of the SEO puzzle.

Make sure that your SEO team and your social team are in constant communication for best results of both programs.

Lesson #6 – Develop a Consistent Link Acquisition Strategy

Acquiring links is never easy. If you want to do it right, it’s even harder.

Once you get past a few directory submissions and some other low-hanging fruit, there is really no one size fits all methodology to acquire links. That’s why search engines place so much value on them in the ranking algorithms.

The key to getting links on a consistent basis is to effectively market relevant and valuable content to a target audience on an ongoing basis. It takes creativity, patience, and commitment as well as integrated strategy of aligning all of your digital marketing activities with link building best practices.

Lesson #7 – Create a Solid Analytics Platform that Allows Understanding of User Behavior

In order to make data-driven decisions that improve ROI, you have to have a solid understanding of your performance metrics and you have to be able to accurately those key performance indicators. Therefore, at a bare minimum, you must have a comprehensive web analytics platform that has been properly configured to measure organic search traffic, brand versus non brand performance and conversions.

Your web analytics system should be integrated with your CRM data, your ranking data and your social media performance data in order to get the most complete view possible of user behavior across your site and other digital marketing assets.

Having this visibility allows you to measure change to performance based on spend or based on a set of activities which in turn will allow you to evaluate how effective those actions are at producing incremental revenue.

Lesson #8 – Always be Testing

Having a strong analytics foundation allows you not only to understand performance but to test new tactics and gauge their effectiveness. Website elements like landing page design, page titles, link acquisition techniques, content segments and calls to action should constantly be tested for improvement.

Small increases to conversion rates can add up to big increases in revenue and you never know where you can find those conversion increases unless you’re diligent about ongoing testing and optimization. Even simple A/B testing can provide huge dividends if it’s consistently applied to the right application.

Lesson #9 – Integrate Paid & Organic Search

Finding the right balance paid and organic search is a challenging endeavor for many companies. Every market is a little different and creating an optimal spend budget based on your organic ranking takes some time and some testing to get right.

You can increase the effectiveness of both your paid and organic search programs by ensuring that performance data is shared between both teams. Your organic keyword performance should influence which words you target in paid search and vice versa.

Ensuring that top performing keywords are identified and communicated to both teams is a critical first step toward organic and paid search integration.

Lesson #10 – Develop a Strong Training and Communication Structure

Empowering your team members to contribute to the success of your SEO program through SEO best practices training pays dividends over the long term. Running a successful SEO campaign at the Enterprise level requires contributions from a myriad of team members including IT folks, content writers and developers, social media team members and even executives.

Getting all these folks up to speed on how they can contribute to your SEO efforts and why their contributions are so important is critical in creating a scalable program that produces results.

Conclusion

Hopefully these 10 lessons have given you some tangible ideas on how to improve your own SEO program, especially if you’re running an enterprise SEO campaign. Adhering to these principles will give you the strongest opportunity for success. Good luck!