How To Optimize Your Articles For SEO, Part 1
If you’re reading this page, you’re probably doing SEO for your blog, website, or article and are looking for tips or methods that can be used over and over to get the results you want.
Well, we all want to see results and there are a lot of good methods out there that do work, but unfortunately there are times when you might end up having to pay some savvy marketer to get “insider access” to some “brand new secret seo method” that is being hyped left and right.
At Blogging Success, we feel bloggers everywhere should be able to get noticed without having to pay for it. I don’t mean to badmouth the marketers. In fact a lot of the times they do have valuable insights on methods that do work and work well, so sometimes it should be worth paying for. But SEO isn’t rocket science.
The single most important factor of search engine optimization is “relevance”. Remember that word.
When someone using a search engine wants some information they typically type their query into Google. Guess what shows up first? The most relevant page!
Now to say SEO is all about relevancy would be a lie. There’s more to it than that, but if you can get this concept down first, you’ll be a lot better off.
What is relevancy?
To find out, here is an activity for you.
The first thing anyone starting SEO should do is bookmark the Google Keywords Analyzer Tool. This thing is the holy grail of keyword suggestion tools and you’ll see why very soon.
There are many ways you can use this tool. The first would be to type a seed keyword phrase you plan on targeting (ie. ‘poker’ or ‘golf’) into the space provided under the Descriptive Words or Phrases button.
Why is this important? Because Google will generate a monsterous list of keywords that it thinks are related to your seed keyword. (We’ll use poker as an example.)
Not only does it bring up this huge list of keywords, but it also gives you the amount of advertiser competition bidding on the particular keyword, the average monthly search volume for the previous month, and the average monthly search volume per 12 months. This is very valuable information because you now have a list of related terms to your original seed term. Each one of these keywords could represent an article topic to write about or just other keywords for you to sprinkle into your article or website.
However, there is another, more effective way to use this tool.
Let’s say I just wrote this article on “How To Play Omaha Poker.” Now lets say I wanted to find out what other keywords Google thinks are relevant to content.
Go back to the Google Keywords Analyzer Tool and paste the URL to your article into the space provided under the Website Content button.
Google will populate another list of keywords it thinks are relvant to your content. But this time it will separate keywords by theme into relevant groups. So if we paste the URL for that poker article into the space provided, we will receive a list of keywords grouped by theme like “texas hold em poker”, “texas holdem poker”, “how to play”, “online poker”, “poker strategy”, and so on, along with longer-tail keywords for each group.
Keep in mind not all of these suggestions will be relevant to your subject, but if you can get an idea of what people are searching for, and the demand of that particular phrase, you can be creative and think of another topic to write about that weaves the suggestion and the seed together.
For example, we could combine the phrases “texas holdem poker” and “online poker” into “online texas holdem poker”. And both of these keywords have a tremendous amount of search volume every month. Then you can take the longer-tail keywords and mesh them with your new keyword phrase for even more targeted relevancy.
That’s more of a chance for your page to be seen and your content relevancy will contribute to a higher overall quality score from Google.
Hopefully you can see the significance of all of this. The possibilities are endless.
However, this step alone will not get you to the top of the rankings in Google. There are other methods you must employ alongside this one, and in the next section we’ll be discussing a few more of them.
Stay tuned!
Also, please remember, this article series is covering Search Engine Optimization and not traffic generation in general. We will also be covering this topic in a future article. Please stay tuned for that!
If this article helped you out in any way, please let us know about it! We love feedback and love helping to make a difference in people’s lives.
Good article for newbies