I recently spoke with a client and explained how to look at writing articles differently. In this sense, I was going over how an audience searches for content on the internet using search engines and SEO scores for content. I use Yoast to help guide through creating and structuring my posts with SEO in mind. It’s not the foremost point – a post needs to be about something; anything. So if, let’s say, someone want to write about race cars, they’ll want to include content relevant to both that ‘something’ as well as speak to the audience concerning their tastes about race cars.
I also went over the fundamentals:
- Your H1 tag (title of the article) should have your ‘something’ in it
- Your ‘something’ should be mentioned in the article
- WordPress takes care of adding that something into the title tag (different from H1) as well as putting it in the URL
Yoast will also let you know that you haven’t written enough. Sometimes, you can get the point across under 300 words, but Yoast recommends more and I’m not sure if that’s a recommendations from SEO engines or from Yoast. I factor this in to my writing but I don’t put a lot of weight on it. Yoast also reminds the writer to add an outbound (and internal) link. All of these things will help increase the ranking score of your content.
I came across this article that had another tip to writing: freshness. I explain this to my clients and the importance of updating their sites, either by article or content on pages, but usually just articles. This article is very competitive and brings up another issue I see a lot in my work – fluff. I have to learn, continuously, new technology and that requires a lot of reading and research. I see fluff everywhere. Not to mention the advertisements on articles which become a sort of game of “How fast can you close the pop-ups?”
