20 Best Tips To Write SEO Optimized Article in WordPress

Writing a blog post -like all other writing- is a skill. To keep your reader interested, you should think about structuring your text and writing in an appealing style. You can help your readers to grasp the main idea of your post by providing headings, subheadings, and clear paragraphs.

If people understand and like your text, they are much more inclined to share, like, tweet and link to your post. And that will increase your rankings. So, in order to improve your ranking in Google, you should definitely try to maximize your writing skills and SEO optimized article which is properly optimized with SEO and good keywords. Doing this It will also increase AdSense revenue and Alexa rank.

For some, writing for SEO purposes and writing to attract and keep attracting your audience could appear as two contradictory goals. I totally disagree with this. Indeed, if you not only want a good but also an SEO-friendly blog post, the words you want to be found on should be in a very prominent place. But, using your keywords too often severely damages the readability of your text. So, you definitely shouldn’t do that!

In this post, I would like to give some tips on writing blog posts that are both very readable as well as SEO-friendly. I genuinely think those two goals should (and easily can!) go hand in hand.

Before anything, your blog post just has to be a good piece of writing! A lot of bloggers just begin to write when creating a new blog post. They just type what comes to mind. For some, this may be sufficient, because they are natural writing talents. Others might need some help. I always follow the next set of ‘rules’ myself.

1. Think before you write

Think hard about the message of your text.

• What do you want to tell your readers?
• And what’s the purpose of your text?
• What do you want your readers to do at the end of the page?

Write down the answers to these questions before you begin writing.

2. Write down the structure of your blog post

Start your post by creating a clear structure.

Every post should have...

• some sort of introduction (in which you introduce your topic),
• a body (in which the main message is written) and
• a conclusion (which should summarize the most important ideas or deduce some new idea).

Write down what you want to write in all these three sections. You now have a kind of summary of your post. The real writing can begin!

3. Get your keyword research on

If you're going to post content on your site anyway, you might as well take the time to make sure Google takes notice of your effort.

Find out which keywords and phrases people are searching for (as well as what you can be competitive in), and make yourself a spreadsheet.

Keep track of how many times you work the keywords into your web content writing, and use the right tools to track where you rank for the keywords you target. Don't know where to get started?

4. Put the keywords to work

It's not enough to just use the keywords in 2-3% of the copy. You need to put the primary keyword in the title of the blog/article, as well as in the first and last sentence.

By doing this, the keywords stand out to the search engine crawlers, as well as the eyes of the readers.

Remember, the people using search engines are searching for that particular phrase because they want to know more about it/buy it, so it makes sense to give them what they're looking for.

You'll get more clicks if you do — it's one of the tricks of the trade for professional SEO article writers.

5. Write about something people care about

Nobody knows your business like you do — so what kind of expert advice or tips do you have that you can share? If not, you can at least discuss news relating to your business.

When in doubt, look at your list of SEO keywords and see what kind of list, link bait or in-depth posts you can work those keywords into.

Don't be afraid to interview some experts, either (if you quote them and feature their expertise in your post, they'll be likely to share your content via their social channels — this way, you can leverage larger networks to increase the size of your own).

6. Use paragraphs

Everybody uses paragraphs, but make sure to use paragraphs that make sense. Do not start a new sentence on a new line, just because it looks nice.

There should be a reason for making a new paragraph. Every paragraph should have a main idea or the main subject.

Ask yourself what the main idea of each paragraph is. You should be able to grasp that main idea in only one sentence. If you need more sentences, you simply need more paragraphs!

7. Use Headings

Headings structure the entire page, so you should use headings. They’re important for readability, but for SEO as well.

Headings help Google to grasp the main topics of a long post and therefore can help in your ranking. If you want people to find their way in your articles, you should use subheadings.

Subheadings will lead people, help them scan your page, and clarify the structure of your articles.

Make sure you use your keywords in some subheadings. Not in each and every one of them though, as it will make the text unreadable.

8. Use signal words

Signal words help people to scan through your text and help people to grasp the main idea. Let’s say, for instance, that there are three reasons for people to buy your product.

You should use signal words like: ‘first of all’; ‘secondly’ and ‘finally’. Also, words as ‘nevertheless’, ‘surely’ and ‘indeed’ give a clear signal to your readers.

Readers will instantly get that a conclusion will follow after words like ‘consequently’, ’so’ or ‘for this reason’. Signal words are therefore very important to structure your text.

9. Let other people read your post

Before publishing your post, let someone else read your post first.

Ask him/ her whether he understands the main idea of your post.

Correct typos and sentences that aren’t formulated correctly.

10. Optimize the length of your article

Make sure your articles have a minimum of 300 words.

Google likes long articles if your article is too long though it might scare away users. So try to stop at around 700 words.

And, as a general rule of thumb: try to put your search terms in about 1 to 2 percent of your text.

So in an article of 300 words, you should mention your search terms 3 to 6 times.

11. Link to previous content

If you already wrote some content about the topic of your current post, don’t forget to link to these posts. It will make your post stronger because you show some authority on the subject.

Next, to that, your link structure is important for your ranking in Google as well.

You should read Joost his post about cornerstone articles if you want to read more about this.

12. Add content regularly

Adding actual and functional information to your website will give Google the idea that your website is alive.

If it’s not an active website, Google will crawl it less often and it might become less appealing to Google to include the page in the search results.

13. Use Yoast SEO plugin

Yoast SEO plugin helps you write an SEO-friendly blog post. You start by choosing your focus keyword. This is the most important search term you want people to find this particular page for.

The plugin checks your post to see whether you use the keyword in the right places, and it measures many other aspects of the text.

If you are using Yoast SEO Plugins then You can continue reading to write SEO optimized article But Before Taking this Steps you need to Properly Configure Yoast SEO Plugin.

14. Post title and Meta title

First, you need to understand the difference between post title and meta title.

• Post title: how your reader will see the post
• Post meta title: what search engines will see and show in the search result

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 a meta title.

Tip: Keep post title less than 66 characters.

15. Post meta description

All the SEO plugins allow you to add meta descriptions, which play a major role in search engine ranking. Think of a meta description as 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 from now on.

Now that you understand what a meta description does, it is very important to go back and add meta descriptions to any of your previously published posts which do not have one.

Every post you write is important from the perspective of ranking and traffic. Google sees every blog post as a different webpage so that you can rank every post for certain keywords.

16. 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, and this does not serve them well at all.

When naming an image, keep the name relevant to the 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”.

Here, we use an effective plugin called SEO Friendly Image, which uses the image name as ALT attributes. This way, when people search for an image in a Google Image search, they will land on our blog post.

If you choose not to use such a plugin, you can always manually add ALT (alternate text) when you upload an image.

I have seen positive results when using keywords in image anchor text (when naming an image), so you should at least use keywords in your image alt text.

17. Interlink and Anchor text

When we write a new post, it’s always a good idea to link back to old posts so that readers will find the old posts, and search engines will re-crawl the old blog posts.

When you interlink, you should use the anchor text technique to interlink. Simply put, when you link to a blog post you see an option to add link and title. Make sure to fill out the post title or main keywords for the post you are linking to.

Here, We also use a plugin called SEO Smart links for automatic internal linking. This helps in better linking of articles & reduces the bounce rate.

18. Permalink and remove stop words

When We write a post, we usually use a post title with lots of stop words. You can find a comprehensive list of stop words here and here.

So for example, when we write a post with the title: How To Write Perfect SEO-Optimized Articles in WordPress, our post permalink by default would be: domain.com/How-To-Write-Perfect-SEO-Optimized Articles-in-WordPress.html

“To” and “in” are stop words in the example above.  You can click on edit permalink and change the permalink to "Write-SEO-Optimized-Articles", thus eliminating the stop words.

Note: Never change your post permalink once the post is published.

19. H1, H2, H3 Headings

We use the Thesis post styling feature to create the style of our blog post.  This is fine, but we must not ignore one of the most important aspects of SEO, and that is using proper H1, H2, H3 headings.

By default, in any SEO-optimized theme, the post title uses H1 tags.

So for the next subheading, you can use an H2 heading, and an H3 heading, and so on.

Quick Checklist

• Post title for readers & search engine (keywords in H1, H2, H3 and post title)
• Post permalink (remove stop words from permalink)
• Interlinking within a post with anchor text
• Image Alt text (use keyword)
• Post meta description (optimize it for better CTR, and use your target keyword once)
• Post meta keywords (leave it blank)
• Add links to reliable & trustworthy resources within the blog article

20. Become your own online PR agency

Once you've written and posted the fresh content, the work is only half complete. The final step of all web content writing is acting as your own online PR agency — link to your content all over the place.

• Comment on blogs and link back to your site.
• Submit your content to Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon.

Social media management and web content writing go hand-in-hand, and as soon as you hit the "Publish" button on your fresh article or blog, you should tweet your heart out.

Let us know if you have any questions, or if you have any other suggestions. Feel free to use our comments section below!

Also, please remember to share this post via Twitter, Google Plus or Facebook if you think others might benefit from the information in this post.