There is much to know about properly formatted and SEO ready article content. While both elements are essential to effective content marketing, it’s the search engine optimization that will allow your articles to be picked up by the search engines and found by the online searchers.
It's important for writers and authors who use blogging to know how to use their content effectively. This will increase your visibility, expert status, readership, and ranking.
So, what are the elements needed to create SEO effective content?
1. Create ‘shareable’ and keyword optimized blog posts.
The ‘old’ SEO had you optimizing keywords that search engines would find, categorize, and index in order to place that content as results based on search queries.
Today, it’s all about providing quality content that readers will find valuable enough to share. You want readers to share that article or post with Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Google Plus, and other social networks.
While you also need to provide keywords for the search engines to find, the key to article marketing now is to provide quality content, so it can go viral.
SEO is a kind of popularity contest. The more people like and share your content the greater value you (your site) has with Google and other search engines.
2. Include Your Bio
You’d think every writer would make sure they receive credit for their article content, but if you read some blogs, even those with multiple contributing authors, there are some with no byline. Even if it’s your own blog, at least end the post with your name.
For article directories, each service has its own resource box instructions. For guest blogging you don’t want your byline to be too long – make it short and effective. You can include your name with a couple of sentences letting the reader know why he should click on your link.
Your tag, bio, byline, is how you get credit for what you write.
3. Blog Post Marketing Tags
Including keywords or tags where allowed is essential to article marketing and its SEO effectiveness. Most hosting services and article directories provide specific areas at the bottom of the article for keywords or tags. Take advantage of this tool.
These tags should be relevant to the content and will allow the search engines to categorize and index your content. This in turn will allow your article to be found by people searching for your topic.
4. Link to More Content
This step is simple. In any article you publish on your own blog or submit for a guest post (if the host site allows it) link to other articles or a landing page on your site. You can do this within your content by hyperlinking a relevant word or phrase to a relevant article on your site.
You can also include a “Related Articles” section at the end of your article and list a couple of titles with hyperlinks to the actual articles on your site. Or, after a bit of information within the article add, “For more information on this check out” and add the link.
This allows you to get even more ‘juice’ out of your articles. You may not be able to do this with article directories, but for your blog posts, it will keep visitors on your own site longer and draw them further into your pages, and will bring visitors to your guest posts back to your site. Search engines like this marketing technique.
For those who aren’t sure how to hyperlink, you simply highlight the relevant word or phrase, click on the link option in your toolbar, put in the URL, and click okay. Simple.
There you have it, four blog post SEO ready tips to get your blog posts doing what they should be doing: getting read, getting shared, and bringing traffic to your site.
Karen Cioffi is a online marketing instructor for WOW! Women on Writing and Working Writers Club. Check out her classes on Blogging:
Become a Power-Blogger in Just 4 Weeks
Blogging Made Easy (a four-week class for beginners)
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