Article writing and
Optimization of Article for Search
1. Post Title and Meta Title
First, you need to understand the
difference between post title and meta title.
·
Post title: How your reader sees the title of the
post on your website.
·
Post meta title: How search engines show your
post in search results.
If you have not specified a meta
title in your SEO settings, your post
title will be treated as the meta title.
·
It is important to have your keywords in the meta title.
Pro
Tip: Keep your post titles less than 66
characters.
2. Post Meta Description
All of
the most popular SEO plugging allow you to add meta descriptions to a post.
These descriptions play a major role in search engine ranking.
Think
of a meta description as a sales copy for your blog post:
·
In 156 characters, you need to add your keywords and create a
description that is
seductive enough for users to click on it.
If you
have not added meta descriptions in the past, you should start doing it
immediately.
Meta
descriptions are very important.
By
optimizing your post meta descriptions, you are ensuring that every post you
write has the potential to drive a maximum amount of traffic to your site.
Google sees every blog post as a different web page so
you can rank every post for certain keywords. Meta descriptions are great
places to put keywords.
3. Image Alt Attribute
Google
can’t read images.
·
Text is how
Google recognizes an image.
To
ensure that search engines can understand what an image is about, you must be
sure to use proper image names.
Many
people make the mistake of uploading images with names like image001.jpg.
·
This is a huge mistake!
When
naming an image, keep the name relevant to image itself.
For
example, if you take a screenshot of an AdSense
dashboard, and
you name the image “AdSense”, it will not be targeted. Instead, you need to
use a name like “AdSense-dashboard”.
4. Interlink and Anchor Text
When
writing a new post, it’s always a good idea to link back to old blog posts so
that readers will stick around your site for longer and also so that search
engines can re-crawl these old posts.
This helps in better navigability of your site which
reduces the bounce rate-another important SEO factor. When you interlink, you
should use the anchor text technique.
Simply
put, when you link to a blog post, you see an option to add a link and a title.
Make
sure to fill out the post title with the main keywords for the post that you
are linking to.
5. Permalinks: Remove stop
words
 |
When we write a post, our post titles usually come with
lots of stop words. So for example, when we write a post with the title:
·
3 Ways to Make
a Blog Business Plan
Our
post permalink, by default, would be:
·
domain.com/3-ways-to-make-a-blog-business-plan.html
“To” and
“a“ are stop words in the example
above.
You can click on edit permalink and change the permalink to “blog-business-plan”, thus eliminating the stop words.
·
Important Note: Never change your post
permalink once the post is published.
6. H1, H2, H3 Headings
We
use the Thesis post styling feature to
create the style of our blog posts. This is fine, but we must not ignore one of the most important
aspects of SEO:
·
Using proper H1, H2, and H3 heading tags.
By
default, in any SEO-optimized theme, the post title uses an H1 heading tag. So
for the next sub-heading, you can use an H2 heading, and then an H3 heading,
and so on.
It is
always a good idea to use proper heading tags for effective SEO writing,
especially when you are writing a long post.
According
to the SEO community, it’s a good idea to use
your keywords in H1, H2, and H3 tags.