How to Write SEO Articles – Part 1

Following a recent article, A Freelance Writer’s Basic Guide to SEO, we received several requests asking how SEO knowledge can be used in practice, when writing articles. Naturally, we are 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 Optimised 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 visualise, 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 ‘techy 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 and it must be imortant 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 keyphrases that are relevant to the topic, and the article context. These keywords and keyphrases must appear seamlessly in the article, and not disrupt the natural flow of the piece; they should ehnance it and be inconspicuous at the same time.
I’ll cover the ‘techy bit’ in the part 2 of this article.

Keywords and Keyphrases
There’s no science to figuring out what keywords to use within the content of your article, so that they show up in search engine results. Forget about AdWords, keyword software, scientific algebra, and costly training courses. In my opinion these are expensive sledgehammers being wielded to crack a nut, and in my experience, are only designed by people hoping to make a quick buck by taking advantage of what writers don’t know.

Here’s what to do. Sit down with a notepad and pen, and write down all the words and phrases that could possibly relate to the subject/business interest you are writing about. Almost all of these will (or should) be getting used in the meta data of the web page, but this will probably not be of your concern anyway (this is also covered in the ‘techy bit’ in part 2).
Some of the keywords you write down, can be used within the SEO article.
For instance, I recently wrote an article for a website that is in the business of superior tourist accommodation in the Scottish Borders – a bed and breakfast. The keywords and phrases I came up with were: “bed and breakfast”, “hotel”, “guest house”, “Scotland,” “Borders”, “tourism”, “accommodation”, “Scottish Tourist Industry”, etc.

However, in most cases, especially if you have been hired to write an SEO article for a third party, it is more likely you will be given certain keywords to use within an article in advance. This is fine – they’ve done the brain storming for you – but however they came up with the words and phrases, it’s your job to write a quality article that has them embedded in the text.
It’s not difficult, as you will see in part 2 of this article next week, when I look at applying the keywords and keyphrases, utilising hypertext links in text, keyword density, and web page optimisation (the ‘techy bit’).

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SEO AUDIT

How to Perform a SEO Audit

If you associate the word “audit” with taxes and IRS, then probably the very word itself makes you shiver but fear not -when SEO is concerned, “audit” is a nice word and a very, very necessary activity. This article will teach you in details how to perform a SEO audit and you will see for yourself that not all audits are a nightmare.

Why Do You Need a SEO Audit?

When you think how much time SEO takes, you might frown at the very idea to spend more time on it. While this could be true for many SEO activities, like getting thousands of low quality backlinks that are not just a waste of time but they could really hurt your rankings, the case with SEO audits is different. SEO audits are not a waste of time for sure. Yes, a thorough audit of a big site could take days or even weeks but without it you are left in the dark.

Basically, the main purpose of a SEO audit is to give you an idea where your SEO efforts have got you to so far. Without this knowledge, it makes no sense to perform any SEO activities, since you don't know what the return from them is. This is why a SEO professional can't do without occasional (but preferably regular) SEO audits.

Crawl Your Site

Before you start with the analysis steps of a SEO audit, you need to perform some prep steps. The first one is to crawl your site. This will tell you if you have sections of your site that are not accessible to search engines. If you there are such pages/sections, you know right away why they don't rank well – actually, they don't rank at all because they are not included in the databases of search engines. To perform a crawl of your site, you need a tool. The choice of tools here is pretty rich but we can whole-heartedly recommend the Search Engine Spider Simulator tool. It's a straightforward tool that tells you what is indexable from your site and what isn't.

Check What Search Engines Say about Your Site

A crawler gives you a rough idea about what from your site is indexable and what isn't but this is not all the data we need. The fact that a page is crawlable doesn't always mean it's included in search engines' databases. Therefore, we need to check what of our crawlable pages made it there and what didn't.

Unfortunately, in order to do so, we need to hack the databases of Google, Bing, and the other search engines and this certainly isn't a viable option. The next best thing is to use the sets of Webmaster tools these search engines offer for free. If you are not familiar with Google Webmaster Tools or Bing Webmaster Tools, it's high time to correct this and start using these tools regularly. The data you will get from them is not everything you need but for a start, they are enough to perform a SEO audit.

Time for the Actual SEO Audit

After you prepared yourself by checking what's crawlable from your site and what webmaster tools report, now we can start the SEO audit itself.

1 Analyze Accessibility and Indexability

The first step in the accessibility and indexability analysis is to make sure you haven't by accident blocked crawlers from your site.

A. Analyze Robots.txt

To check if you haven't blocked crawlers, have a look at your Robots.txt file to see if there are no user agents banned, or sections of your site that should be indexed put by mistake in the banned area. You can check this in the file itself or use Google Webmaster Tools to see which URLs it lists as banned.

B. Check 404 Errors and Redirects

Another common area of problems are 404 errors and redirects. While you crawl your site, pay attention to these errors and if you find any, correct them immediately. As for redirects, as you know, there are good redirects and bad ones. Therefore, make sure you use good ones only (i.e. 301 redirects) and not bad redirects, such as 302, meta refresh redirects, JavaScript-based or anything similar.

C. Examine the XML Sitemap

XML sitemaps are way too important to neglect. This is why, no SEO audit is complete without a check if your XML sitemap is up-to-date, readable, and functioning. Your XML sitemap must contain only pages that are really on your site and all your pages you want indexed must be included in the sitemap. Any deviation from this rule is a potential problem, so you need to find it and solve it now. Also, double check if your XML map is submitted to search engines. You might have the perfect XML sitemap but if it isn't used by search engines, this makes it pointless.

D. Web Design/Development Audit

When we discuss availability, we can't skip such very important factors, such as site architecture, speed of loading, uptime, use of Flash/JavaScript. Your site architecture is directly related to availability – the more menus and submenus you have, the harder to access it (and all equal, the more broken links). If your site takes ages to load and/or is frequently down, this is also a turnoff to both human users and search engine spiders, so these issues also need to be corrected asap. Just find a good host and your problems are over!

Flash and JavaScript are two of the major nightmares of any SEO professional. While very often their use can't be avoided completely, if there is Flash- or JavaScript-based navigation, this spells huge SEO problems and a SEO audit should spot these as severe issues that need to be fixed.

In addition to accessibility, site indexibility is also something you need to check, when you perform a SEO audit. Here are some quick ways to do it.

E. Check the Number of Pages Indexed by Search Engines

The simplest way to check the number of pages indexed by a particular search engine is to type this in the search bar: site:yoursite.com where you replace yoursite.com with the actual name of your site. This command gives you the number of pages from your site indexed by the search engine. If the number of pages indexed by search engines is close to the actual number of pages on your site, this is the best because it shows that your site is indexed successfully. If the number of pages indexed by search engines is much smaller than the actual number of pages on your site, this shows that many pages are inaccessible and you need to check why this happens.

If the number of pages indexed by search engines is much bigger than the actual number of pages on your site, this suggests you have lots of duplicate content you need to clear as fast as you can. Just use site:yoursite.com&start=990 to see if Google will report duplicate content.

If you find nothing when you issue the site:yoursite.com command, you can scream with pain because (unless this is a new site) this usually means one thing – you have been excluded from the search engine's index. This is the most severe penalty a site can get! If this happens to you, check here how to proceed.

2 Analyze On-Page Ranking Factors

The group of on-page ranking factors is huge and so is its importance. We could add some more on-page factors but here are the basic ones you shouldn't skip:

A. Site URLs

Site URLs need to be user friendly (i.e. no dynamic URLs, if possible), with the relevant keywords in them, and have no overlap (i.e. no two URLs should point to the same page, unless you use redirects because for search engines this is duplicate content).

B. Page Content

Page content is a topic on its own because you can devote lots of time to SEO auditing your content. The points to consider are numerous but the main ones include: Is your content thin - i.e. do you have pages with just a few words/sentences of content?

Is your content unique – i.e. do other sites in your niche have similar stuff or not? Is your content keyword-rich – i.e. do you have a good keyword density for your target keywords (without going in the keyword spamming direction, though)? Do your keywords appear in the right places – i.e. headings and the first paragraph? Do you have duplicate content on page and/or sitewise – i.e. if you use the same footer/sidebar on each page, this is also duplicate content, though it certainly is less severe than having the same articles two or more times on the site. C. Outbound Links

The quantity and quality of outbound links is of vital importance. This is why you need to double check that you have no more than 1 outbound link per 500-1,000 words of text and that this link points to a reputable site. Of course, you can use nofollow for outbound links but still this isn't a guarantee because not all search engines (even Google itself) honor it at all times. D. Meta Tags

Meta tags are frequently underestimated but they do matter for good rankings. For instance, you might want to make sure that each page has a unique meta description. You should also check that the