Optimizing Your Articles for SEO

It is not a secret that over 50% of today’s generic web traffic still comes from search engines. This is part of the reasons why SEO or Search Engine Optimization is still heavily used to promote a website. Combined with content marketing, SEO can be very effective indeed. In this article, we are going to discuss how you can optimize your website’s content to support your SEO campaign, as content most probably represents the number one way through which you can make sure that more and more people reach your site and that they visit it later on. 

Balance Is Key

In the old days, site owners used to stuff as many keywords as possible into an article. Even worse, keyword density can be as high as 80%, making the article itself completely unreadable. This practice used to help sites rank higher a few years ago, but it is certainly a practice that you must never use today.

You need to keep a nice balance between keyword exposure and the quality of the article itself. A good rule of thumb is to keep keyword density well under 3% and readability high. Search engine crawlers are much smarter than you think, and they will appreciate good quality content for what it is. Of course, your viewers will be more happy reading the article as well, increasing their time on site and improving your search engine rankings generically.

Headings and Keyword Placements

Today, where keywords appear are actually more important than the frequency of appearance itself. Instead of stuffing so many keywords into one article, try placing them naturally as part of the article. Make sure the title of the article includes the keyword – or a variation of it – and that you add subtitles and headings to amplify the message.

Keep articles short and be sure to use headings and subtitles to help viewers screen through it quickly. Since keywords are strategically placed, you should be able to improve the search engine ranking and the overall quality of the site’s articles altogether.

Another important tip would be to sometimes make the main keyword bold, as some research has shown that this tends to give certain sites more of a view in search engines.

Add Links and Cross-Promote

Adding links to an article is a common practice to help optimize the article for SEO. You don’t have to link to an external website too. In fact, adding links to an article is a good way to promote other contents on your website.

However, one adding links, there are a couple of different important aspects that should be kept in mind. Through this, we find the idea that you should have a couple of links to your site, so that visitors can browse around and find more of the features that you may offer. Together with this, it is also important to make sure THat you also place interesting links to other sites, as apart from the SEO purpose that this serves, people will think ‘Wow, this site got me to an interesting place. I should definitely check it out again in the future’. As you may already know, this represents exactly what you should want visitors to think for themselves whenever they get to your site.

Based on everything that has been outlined so far, you should now have a better view on what works with content SEO and what does not. By following the tips from this article, your site will be more optimized from this point of view, which is exactly what you should be aiming for. In order to be able to get more information and Internet marketing tips from us, you may want to check out our dedicated section right here.