Have you been recently asked to write content for your company? Are you the owner of a company that needs to help drive traffic to your website, but you have no idea what guidelines you should follow when writing articles with the sole intent of creating traffic for your business?
This is a very common scenario and it’s actually not that surprising that you might not know what’s the best practices for writing SEO articles for your website, blog, or even for the web. It takes special consideration to write content for these platforms, because you want to ensure your content targets a specific keyword or phrase, but you also don’t want to overdo the usage of the term. If you are submitting to some article directories they will even warn you and limit your article to only use a term a specific number of times. There is a term called Keyword Frequency that’s used in the industry, and it’s calculated by taking the total number of words in writing and then dividing that by the keyword or phrase count in the article. Some people say the percentage should be high or lower, but we recommend a percentage of between 3 and 5%, and really you shouldn’t use a phrase more than 5 times in any article.
However there are exceptions to the rule, and some industries as I’ve learned from experience, there’s only one term used to describe the who industry, so sometimes you may find that you use a word more frequently for some articles than you do in other articles. For example, my key phrase in this article is “SEO Articles”, however the keyword “Article” is applying to a lot of different scenarios in the text, and there really not a ton of options I have around this. So you have to be careful, but sometimes it’s just unavoidable.
Another guideline to keep in mind is the length of the article. You don’t want too short of an article, but usually a length between 300 and 500 words is the best length, however if you have plenty of information you want to present, there is no shame in going longer, and depending on where you are placing the article, you could end up splitting the article into several pages and that can have more impact on your pages than just a one page article.
Lastly, you want to make sure you don’t overdo the formatting for an article or the graphics included in an article. You should also only include a maximum of three links in any given article. Try to link out to useful resources that might help the reader understand the topic that you are discussing. You also may occasionally (but try not to in all your articles) to link to something on your own website. In the Search Engine Optimization industry it is a well-known fact that in text links are the most valuable types of links.