How to write a perfect SEO article?

 Have you ever dreamed of having your blog posts or web pages on the first page of Google search results? To make this dream a reality, take note of the ingredients needed to write an SEO article.

SEO article writing is an integral part of the essentials to improve your natural referencing. However, capturing the attention of Internet users and keeping them on your page with optimized content is not always easy.

This article presents the rules to follow to write SEO optimized content in order to obtain a good ranking on search engines.

Identify the target keywords and phrases of your SEO article

Before you start writing the perfect SEO article, it is important to identify the keyword to target.

It is indeed for your main keyword that your web content will be referenced. In addition to this, you should also identify secondary keywords related to the subject matter. The goal is to form a rich semantic cocoon around the main keyword.

💡How to achieve this? Do a keyword research with, for example, SEO tools such as SEMRush, Yooda Insight…

If the Domain Rank of your site is low, favor strategic keywords with a low competition rate. Even if the search volume is low, you will have an easier time positioning yourself in the top 5.

On the other hand, if you are competing with sites with high authority, a keyword with a high CPC and a large search volume will be more interesting for your site.

Write an optimized title

Once the main keyword of your SEO content has been determined, you must write a catchy title that is evocative of the subject. Theoretically, a good article title includes:

• The main keyword
• 60 to 75 characters
• Emotional words (5 tips, top 3 of the best…)

A title optimized in this way has many benefits: low bounce rate, high CTR, etc.

Structure the content with Hn tags of your SEO article

When you write an SEO article, remember to prioritize your content with H2, H3 tags… And with paragraphs of less than 300 words.

The H1 corresponds to the main title of the article while the others are subtitles. It is also recommended to include a citation with the external link and to add bulleted lists if possible.

The plan will result in making the article easy for Google Bots to interpret and enjoyable for your visitors to read. If possible, add your main keyword or its variations in your subtitles. Your article could then look like this:

• <h1>Title with your main keyword</h1>
• <h2>Subtitle with a variation</h2>
• <h3>Possible integration of a secondary keyword</h3>
• <h3>Possible integration of a secondary keyword</h3>
• <h2>Subtitle</h2>

Choose the right length for your SEO article

By exploring the results that appear on the first page on Google, we quickly realize that there is no standard size for an optimized article.

However, you can start from a simple principle to find the optimal size for an SEO article: "The longer the article, the more complete it is and the more time the Internet user will spend on your site".

However, an article that is too long risks boring your readership. The important thing here is to have enough slack to incorporate relevant keywords into the content without straying from the topic.

Content between 1,000 and 1,500 words easily meets all of these criteria. Be sure to create unique content that addresses the topic comprehensively, though.

Integrate keywords correctly into the body of the text

You must insert keywords in your text to obtain an SEO article, but not just anyhow.

First, your main keyword should appear in your introduction. You must then insert your keywords into the article without linking words, but in a natural way. If your keyword is "Paris SEO copywriter", you must insert each word consecutively while maintaining the meaning of the sentence.

As far as recurrence is concerned, the ideal is to stay within a proportion of 2% of the content in order to avoid over-optimization.

💡 For an article of 1,000 words, you can for example insert your main keyword 10 times and its variations 10 times. As for secondary keywords, they must appear in the text at least once.

Add visual aids

Visual aids bring great added value to your SEO article.

They attract the attention of Internet users and improve their reading experience. They also appear in various search results (images, videos, etc.).

Do not hesitate to include visual content (images, videos, Gif, Infographics) in your article. As with text content, you also need to optimize your visuals. It takes a few minutes and it's frankly not rocket science. Explanations:

• fill in the ALT attributes of your images by inserting your main keyword. For this content, my media says "Featured image" will be named in this way article-seo
• optimize your YouTube videos for natural referencing,
• add a link to your site in your infographics.

Easily optimize your article with Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is the plugin available on the WordPress CMS that greatly facilitates the writing of SEO articles. It's sort of your guide.

The tool tells you if necessary the elements to be optimized such as:

• title, meta-description, Alt, H1, H2, H3 tags…
• placement of keywords if unevenly distributed,
• the quality of your article with for example the readability score, the size of your paragraphs…
• the appearance of your content for sharing on your social networks
• internal linking (internal links) and netlinking (external links)

💡 Yoast SEO analyzes your text, identifies SEO optimization and readability issues and gives you recommendations to fix these issues.

You may see notifications like:

• "The SEO title is longer than the length limit. Try to shorten it”,
• or "More than 75% of your H2 and H3 titles reflect the subject of your content. It's too much. Don't over-optimize! ".

As you will have understood, Yoast SEO is a valuable guide in web writing for writing SEO articles on your WordPress.