Optimize Articles For SEO & High Ranking
To Optimize articles for SEO & high ranking, is not as difficult as you may think. In fact a little on page SEO can ensure our articles rank as high as possible and in many cases even managing a page 1 ranking.
These methods work very well for our own sites and so you should have no trouble at all in producing some excellent organic search results, by following our examples.
You only need spend an hour or so browsing through various blogs on the Internet, to realize that many people just do not seem to bother paying much attention at all to how their articles appear to the search engines! And then of course you will also find a few that go completely overboard and grossly over optimize their articles, to the point where they run the risk of getting de-indexed or sandboxed by the likes of Google.
1. The H2 Title / Permalink:
One of the first steps in the optimizing your articles is to research the keywords you intend using in your title. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of this first step as your title is what gets the most weight (value) from the search engines. This is one area I have the most trouble, trying to convince people not to use full sentences including stop words, The H2 title, should contain your keywords yes, but it should not contain full sentences or stop words, as this will only dilute the value given to your keywords. Also you should always try to place your strongest or most important keywords as far left in the title as you can.
Edit out stop words from your title!
It is also worth mentioning that this title in WordPress is usually set as a H2 tag, with H1 being used for the title of your blog & as these heading tags are supposed to be hierarchal, then any other sub headings in the article, should really only use a H3 tag. Don’t think for a moment, that by using a H1 or H2 tag for additional headings throughout your article, it will help your article to rank better, because it most certainly will not; be warned, that this sort of tactic is seen as spamming by most search engines.
2. Most SEO experts will tell you that for SEO optimization purposes, your keywords should be included in your first & last paragraphs and be as close to the left or start of the paragraph as is practical, whilst at all times maintaining readability! In addition to this I will also bold my keywords / phrases to further enhance their ranking ability. I have chosen Optimize Articles, SEO & High Ranking, each keyword or phrase has some pretty good search figures, but also have fairly high competition and therefore may be difficult to rank for, but by creating what is called a long tail keyword, I have combined all my keyword choices into one keyword or phrase “Optimize Articles For SEO & High Ranking”, which will be used as the title.
Any other occurrences of your keywords throughout your article may also be emphasized by bold, italic or underline, but do take care not to over do this part of the optimization process. I usually find that 1 x bold, 1 x italic & 1 x underline is quite sufficient for some decent ranking. Ultimately your article needs to be reader friendly above all else & any inclusion of keywords & phrases needs to be as natural as possible.
3. All In One SEO Plugin
Fill in the relevant boxes for maximum benefit!
In order for me to be able to fully optimize an article, I will always use the “All In One SEO Plugin” & in particular the description box. Even before getting any further than the first paragraph, I will have used the description box with its 160 character limit, to design & build my first paragraph. This is then what is shown in search results & any search terms found in this excerpt will be bolded by the search engines, therefore it is a good idea to try & include your keywords twice in the first paragraph, but not at the expense of losing readability, or being seen as a spammer.
If you have one of the SEO plugins installed, then you can if you wish, ignore this aspect & not bother filling in the details, but doing this does not apply full SEO optimization to your articles, you are in effect leaving things to random selection & pure chance, because if you do not use one of the SEO plugins available from WordPress, then when you submit / post your article it only has a meta title, but lacks a meta description & meta keywords. The search engines lacking the info they require, will pick an excerpt totally at random from your content, which then goes to form your missing meta description, this is not what can be called full optimization of your articles, because it is very likely that the text selected at random will not include your keywords!
4. How Google Ranks Your Articles
When Google & Yahoo views your page, they will look at certain elements and award ranking value accordingly. Here are the page elements in order of value based upon the average across Google and Yahoo;
- Page Title……………………Most important
- H2 Tag
- H3 Tag
- Meta Description
- Meta Keywords
- H1 Tag
- Body Copy
- Body Copy – Bold
- Body Copy – Italic
- Body Copy – Bold & Italic
- URL…………………………..Least important
Summary
Ultimately, how well your article will rank in the search results, will depend greatly on how well you have researched your keywords & how well you optimize articles for SEO & high ranking. Obviously this does not take into account a website’s age, or any image alt & title tags, which also have an effect on ranking, but it will give you a rough idea of what you need to do when you optimize articles for SEO & high ranking. By following these easy steps, you will give your articles a considerable boost in the organic search results and who knows, with a little luck you may also find yourself on page one of Google’s search results.
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Posted by Steve (Admin)
on Oct 19 2010. Filed under SEO Optimization.
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