No one really know how major search engines like Google and Yahoo rank their search results for keywords searched by their users. However, your website can get higher chances to grab that first page of the search result if you follow these practices of writing search engine optimized articles or content.
The organic traffic from search engine to your website is one of the things that you should aim for. It is free but extremely difficult if you do not have any idea where to start.
My approach to writing search engine optimized articles
This is a guideline or best practices for you to apply on-page SEO for your website. Therefore, we will not touch one any other SEO elements in off-page optimization.
The first thing I always do is to figure out what is the best keyword that describes the article the I am going to write. Let’s take for example, you want to write about “cheap guitars“.
Simple Research on Competitors
For those who have been doing research on SEO, you should know that “cheap guitars” is very hard to rank. Even if you are doing perfectly on off-page SEO, I can tell that your article will not be rank in the first page. There are a huge number of competitors willing to put their money on SEO experts to rank their services.
So, to check how many competitors or how hard it is to rank “cheap guitars“, just Google it yourself.
Make sure that you put opening and closing double quotes for the keyword. This is to make sure that the search results return all the websites that have the exact key phrase.
As you can see in the image above, there are 636 thousand web links that you have to compete with. That’s insane.
This is where you can add another phrase, maybe something like this; “cheap guitars for beginners“.
After adding “for beginners“, you can see that the number reduced to approximately 60 thousand. Well, you can start with this keyword.
Add exact keyword in your search engine optimized article title
You already have the exact keyword that you are going to use in writing search engine optimized article. Make sure to put that exact key phrase in your article.
Inside your content
In your content editor, you must have already know that there are many elements that you are going to use in your article. If you want to achieve a search engine optimized article, then you should pay attention in putting the keyword inside these elements:
Heading – The tags are H1, H2, H3, and so on. Basically the title is already in H1.
Paragraph – A paragraph should not have to much words, and do not put your targeted keyword in every paragraph.
Image alt text – Make sure that you put exact key phrase in the alternate text of the images you put in your article. Not all, please, do not over do.
Summary
If you are looking to optimize your content for search engine, there are a lot more to be covered. For writers, writing content is our routine and you do not want to go back to edit all of the un-optimized pieces that you have written before.
By following this guidelines, I can’t guarantee you to get the exposure of search engine first page result. But at least it will add more score to your relevancy and with the other elements of SEO, perhaps you will be there soon.
