Using proven article writing techniques (as outlined below) are critical if you ever want your articles to be ranked by Google. This post is written primarily for those of my team who offer article writing services and assist me with good quality article writing.
For anyone else finding this article I hope you also get some value from it too. I'd love to hear from you if you do.
Quality Article Writing
Quality content is key to any authority websites success. Google has been very clear that they are looking for excellent article writing that adds value and not just a bunch of words on a page.
When anyone writes articles for me, I like to have them follow my quality article writing guidelines below.
Always Add Value
Make sure the article provides value to the reader. If someone typed into a search engine the “target keyword” will the post you write answer their question or add value in any way?
Google Wants To Deliver The Best, So Be The Best.
If a friend or family member was looking for the information in your “target keyword” – you'd want to provide them with the best possible information right? So write your article to help them.
Always keep in mind the purpose of the article – which is to help provide a solution to a problem, and at the end of the article point people back to the phone number on the site or offer them some way to interact with the business for more information (contact form, newsletter etc).
Search for the ‘Target keyword” yourself and see what Google feels is the best – then write an article that is better than what you find (more information, easier to read, more enjoyable).
Best Practices for Quality Article Writing
- Authority Link: Each article needs at least one link to an authority page on a site such as wikipedia or a leading industry organisation or some high ranking web site that talks about the “target keyword”.
- Keyword Focus: Each article needs to have a keyword focus – which means the keyword must be in the title and also mentioned around 5 – 10 times in a 500 word article or 7 to 12 times in a 700 word article.
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Content:
Headline – If you could only write these 2 kinds of headlines you would still have better headlines than 90% of articles on the web.
- “How to (target keyword)”
- Lists “7 ways to (target keyword)“Top 10 tips ______” etc
The “how to” and list style articles are always effective.
There is one more important thing to remember when creating article titles and that is…
Important – make sure your “target keyword” is in the headline.
Body – The body is the meat of the article:
- Make sure your article answers a question or solves a problem
- The article must be the “best” for the given question
- Use bullet points, sub-headings, numbered lists throughout each article
- Include your “target keyword” in the Title, first paragraph, a subheading and at least 1-2 other places in the article
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Article Length – 500 word minimum – Ideally 500 to 800 words.
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Original – Make sure to check to see if the article is original by entering it into –http://www.dustball.com/cs/plagiarism.checker/
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Meta Description: Each article needs a short description of around 150 characters which summarises the article and also has the keyword mentioned in it. This is the 2 lines of information that appears in google when someone searches for the keyword, so this needs to be an intelligent, readable and compelling description (using the keyword) written in a way that will be appealing for someone to click on to read more. This is like writing an ad for the article.
Article Writing Techniques
Character limitations in Meta Tags
Title: 50 – 60 characters
Description: 155 Characters without using quotes
websiteurl.comAvoid using titles that are too long (they get truncated) and also duplicate descriptions. Each one should be unique.
Titles: Article Writing Rules
Any time quotes are used in a meta description, Google cuts off the description. To prevent meta descriptions from being cut off, it's best to remove all non-alphanumeric characters from meta descriptions. If quotation marks are important in your meta description, you can change them to single quotes rather than double quotes to prevent truncation.
To see an example of a High Quality Article Written using the above guidelines… (Quality Article Example – Public Google Document)
Appended 14 July 2014:
What's an authority site?
An authority site is any relevant site that has a high page rank – OR – is a relevant or related industry association, or an industry handbook (not a competitor) or anything that is a well respected content site specifically talking about the content you are writing about.
One way to find these authority sites is to search for associations of the industry you are writing about. Another is to search for the keyword you are writing about and see what pages come up on the first page. As long as they are not a competitor business, and they have a reasonable page rank you can link to one of their pages. Here's a quick video to show you you can do that:
