For anyone who works in the content business, Google can be like the object of a romantic crush: You want to get its attention, but you don’t know how. That’s where SEO comes in. SEO or “search engine optimization” simply means strategically grooming your work to improve its ranking on search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo. Think of it as a way to create “something everyone ogles.”
The higher your work shows up on a search results page, the better your chances of gathering an audience. So, how do you make your articles SEO-friendly? Here are five tips from experts who are virtual matchmakers when it comes to helping attractive young articles connect with choosy search engines.
1. Know Your Keywords
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When it comes to SEO success, keywords are key. These are the words or phrases that best and most specifically identify the focus of your article. Your article’s two to three keywords should match the words or phrases your potential readers would be plugging into a search engine to find just such an article. You can come up with keywords yourself or use a resource like Google’s highly-recommended free keyword research tool, which generates popular search terms based on Web addresses, words or categories you suggest.
But knowing your keywords is only half the battle — where and how often you place them into your article is crucial. “The integration of keywords into headlines, subheads and the upper 20 percent of an article can make the difference between being placed on page one and relegated to obscurity on page five,” said Andrew Barnett, director of digital strategy at Elasticity, a digital communications agency.
2. Optimize Your Headline
When matching search terms to articles, Google looks more closely at headlines than the rest of the text, so it’s important to know how to make your headline more noticeable. First, make sure your keywords are in the headline — and as close to the beginning as possible. “The importance of a keyword exponentially decays the further to the right it shows up in a title,” said David Wolf, an SEO expert and CEO of InBusiness, Inc.
Next, make sure your headlines and subheads are specific and on-point. “Headlines that are not specific enough do not come up in searches,” said Lisa Hickey, publisher of The Good Men Project, an online men’s magazine. “You want your headline to communicate one simple idea, specific enough so that people know what the post is about. This will not only help SEO, but will also help make the article more sharable. And the more it’s shared, the more search engines will see it as a post worthy of showing up in searches.”
| “Where and how often you place those keywords in your article is crucial.” |
Many writers want their titles and headlines to be clever, but “clever” and “SEO-friendly” don’t often play well together. Jeff McRitchie, V.P. of marketing for MyBinding.com, recommends simply considering “what topics searchers are looking for and what keywords they’re using.” He added, “If your title is too creative, off the wall or clever, the article will be difficult to find in search results.”
Jonathan Rick, digital and social media director of Levick Strategic Communications, says you should try to strike a perfect balance between self-explanatory and catchy. “Instead of sacrificing one for the other, try blending creativity with keywords,” he said.
3. Do Some Body Work
After the headline and subheads, the next most important place for keyword placement is in the body of your article. While you want to avoid having your article hijacked by your own keywords, know that repetition indeed helps. Layla Masri, president of Bean Creative, recommends the following keyword location recipe: “Once in the main header, once in every sub-header, two times in the first paragraph, two to four more times throughout the document, and two to three times in links and image alt text on the page.”
Sounds like math, but Masri cautioned, “Remember you’re writing for people, not for search engines. Search engine optimization is an important marketing tool, but a page optimized for computers instead of readers can be painful to digest.”
Brian Patterson, a partner with MangoCo, an online reputation management firm, agrees there’s a limit to keyword usage. “Unnatural use of the keywords, over and over, are easily detected by the search engines as ‘keyword stuffing’ and could end up blacklisting your article,” he said.
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Francis Santos, search manager for Benchmark Email, says Google has an eye out for stuffers. “In the early days, cramming as many key phrases into an article or blog post actually improved your search rank — not anymore. An article stuffed with too many key phrases will not only hurt your rank, but make your writing seem awkward and forced, turning off readers and shrinking your audience.”
“Google is cracking down on all forms of SEO manipulation,” said Wolf. “It’s okay to optimize your content so search engines know what it’s about, but don’t even think about negatively affecting the user experience to please a search engine.”
4. Write Well
Good SEO won’t help the quality of your writing, but good writing can help your SEO. One tip covering both goals is staying on topic. Gennady Lager, director of search marketing for dealnews.com says the single most important aspect of writing for search engine optimization is to “write every article and page with a singular focused contextual intent.”
“If the content of the article strays across multiple topics, it will often dilute the ranking ability of that article for any particular keyword,” he said.
Kari DePhillips, owner of The Content Factory, an online PR company that specializes in Web content and social media, said in-depth articles often have more SEO value than shallower ones. “We’ve found that the standard 300-400 word post isn’t enough to catch the eye of search engines,” she said. DePhillips also said longer articles can take more keywords without sounding keyword-stuffed and are more likely to be shared through social media, which also increases SEO value.
Santos says, “At the end of the day, good writing always wins. If you write an interesting, fact-filled article of real substance, readers will happily pass it along to their friends, boosting your traffic. A well-written, popular article with tons of views will definitely rank well and can easily beat out an average, unremarkable article with the same key phrases.”
| “You should never create a hyperlink out of a phrase like ‘click here’ in an article.” |
5. Link Out (And In)
Links, both embedded in text and placed around or at the end of articles, can also make a difference. “The SEO success of an article is mostly based on its reach. The more links it attracts and the more social shares it receives, the better… Google relies heavily on this to determine rank,” said Marisa Brayman, director of Web and marketing for StadriEmblems.com.
Wolf says linking to your older content is a no-brainer. “Links are the most powerful way to get your content to rank higher. The more times you link back to an article you wrote previously, the better it will do in the search engines.”
But don’t blow the SEO potential of that link by using generic text. “Rather than using link text of ‘click here’ or ‘this article,’ use keywords,” said Patterson. “This text is one of the strongest factors in Google’s algorithm.”
“You should never create a hyperlink out of a phrase like ‘click here’ in an article. It has no value,” said Caitlin Bergmann, social media manager for interactive agency The Concept Farm. “You should link to something that has some meat to it, like ’20 Best Hair Tips for Blondes,’ something people could be searching for.”
All of these tips won’t make you a better writer, and good SEO doesn’t guarantee Google domination. But think for a moment about what got you to click on this very article ___- and learn to leverage that power of attraction for your own work.
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Joel Schwartzberg‘s keywords include writer, Internet executive, and author of “The 40-Year-Old Version,” a collection of personal essays
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