SEO Article Writing

In a recent article, A Freelance Writer’s Basic Guide to SEO, we had several requests asking how SEO knowledge can be used in practice, when writing articles. Naturally, we are only too happy to

oblige.

The methods I am going to talk about in this article have not been learnt in online courses, nor have they been taken from theory manuals you can download for a price on the Internet. Everything I am going to discuss has been gained from hard experience, both as a writer (over 10 years), and as an I.T. consultant (University degree and 18 years in the business).

Is Writing an SEO Article Complicated?

No. There are no magic formulas or weird science to SEO, and there’s no right or wrong way of doing things. There are guidelines, however, as you will discover in this two-part article.

SEO writing is very much a matter of common sense, and the application of some very simple points that are based on the idea of well constructed articles, and well constructed websites. Surprised? Don’t be. Just read on.

SEO writing is no more complicated than writing a standard article for a magazine, the only difference being, there are a couple of other factors to consider. But the basics are always the same, which is where I am going to kick this article off.

Get The Basics Right

Whether the article is for your own website or as part of a freelance writing contract, the most important thing to always remember when writing a Search Engine Optimized article, is to make it a GOOD article.

By good article, I mean the article must be useful to the reader. It should provide them with a benefit they can visualize, or offer something of value to them that is applicable and relevant to their lives or businesses. It should be something they can relate to easily.

There’s no point in writing a technically good SEO article, for it to be a load of nonsense to the reader. Not only will the website concerned lose a potential customer or lose out on traffic and advertising revenue, but the article will become a non-entity and be a complete waste of everyone’s time.

If the article is no good to the reader, don’t expect it to be picked up or linked to by affiliates, link marketers, or any other medium that could have provided valuable promotion or marketing – all of which would have boosted the website’s rankings.

Always remember to write for the HUMAN who will read the article at the end of the line, not the search engine algorithm that finds it. Get that right, and you are already half way there!

Components of SEO Content

An SEO article is made up of two distinct, but very important components:

1. it has to contain relevant and value added content
2. it has to be supported by good website infrastructure (the ‘tetchy bit’)

As I have already mentioned, SEO article content must be topically relevant, and provide value to the reader. And as with a standard article on any conceivable subject that’s possible, it has to have a new angle, a good initial hook, and it must be important to the reader. Writers of articles for all kinds of publication will tell you this; it’s what you learn on day 1 at freelance article writing school.

What they might not tell you until much later, is that in an SEO article content must include certain keywords and key phrases that are relevant to the topic, and the article context. These keywords and key phrases must appear seamlessly in the article, and not disrupt the natural flow of the piece; they should enhance it and be inconspicuous at the same time.

I’ll cover the ‘tetchy bit’ in the part 2 of this article

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