One of the questions we are asked by many companies is how to Write SEO friendly articles. One of the first rules of thumb is to make sure you are writing for humans first. After all, they do determine the worth of your article by linking or sharing it via social media. Beyond writing a great article, there are some tips we use for writing SEO friendly web pages.

How to Write SEO Friendly Articles

• For every page choose a keyword or phrase that you want to the page to be 100% optimized. The best way to do this is think of a title and Google it. Google make suggestions of popular searches and you should use one of these. Originally this blog was titled “How to write SEO friendly pages” but “How to write SEO friendly articles” was already Google search term.
• Use the keyword in the title of the page so it’s an exact match. So in this title I am going to use “How to write SEO friendly articles” so I can index for the exact search
• Ensure the keyword is in the URL
• In most content management systems, the title of your article will appear in the first section heading automatically unless its changed in your template.
• For the body copy make sure the first paragraph and sentence have the keyword. Beyond the first paragraph, use the keyword no less than four times.
• You should look to have qualifiers of the keyword in h2 or h3 section headings IF you have a long article
• Articles should be at least 500 words long. Google is starting to give more weight to long form articles.
• Include a picture and use the alt tags like “how to write SEO friendly articles” so you rank in Google image search.
• IF you are talking about the product in like a blog or want them to go to a download page, hyperlink the keyword to the page where they can get the product.
• Add a meta description that contains the keyword. This will appear bolded in Google’s search results.
• In the Page Title, put the keyword you are optimizing for first and then other keywords after

Yoast

For those of you who struggle to write SEO content, one of the better tools available for SEO is Yoast on WordPress. After you write the article, copy and paste in Yoast to see if it has all the good SEO in the page. This may show you that you need more keywords in the content or in URL and is a great way to continue to learn SEO best practices.