30
Jun
4 things you need to know about article writing
Over the last couple of months I have been analysing a lot of
Estate Agent's News Features and began to notice many Estate Agents
are missing the key point of writing these articles and are making
a lot of common mistakes. I thought I'd take this chance to give
you all the information you need to be able to write good quality
articles and with this knowledge you will be able to give a boost
your press release optimisation strategy.
There are many reasons to write articles. If you write
interesting articles its a great way to drive traffic to your
website, it shows your customers that you know what you are talking
about and also has a great effect on your SEO due to bring new
relevant content to your website and being able to throw in more
keywords to your Estate Agent website.
We are going to focus on the SEO part today and hopefully if you
do it right it will benefit you in the other aspects as well.
So here's what you need to know:
Choosing your keywords
One of your main reasons for writing an article should be about
keywords. These are the terms that draw your users towards your
website via search engines.
For example if your keyword is "Estate Agents in London"
throughout your articles you should be trying to get your key
phrases into either the title or the text.
You don't have to specify on one keyword throughout your
articles, you may want to optimise for "Properties for sale in
London" or "Houses for sale in London".
The difficult part of keywords research is trying to figure out
what your customers will be typing into Google to find your
website. Put yourself into your customer's shoes and think hard
about that question. A lot of time and money can be wasted into
optimising for the wrong term.
Keyword density
This is something you really don't want to think about too much.
Article writing should come naturally and not be you trying to
write a keyword every other word but you should keep this in mind
in case you think you might be keyword stuffing.
Keyword density simply means the number of times a keyword is
used on a webpage compared to the total number of words used on the
same webpage.
We normally advise 200 - 700 words for an
article and you should have keywords consisting of about 3-7% of
that. If you don't put in enough keywords Google won't pick up on
it and writing the article would of been a waste of time. Putting
in too many keywords Google will see it as you trying to keyword
stuff and you will be penalised.
This can seem quite difficult but after writing a few articles
it will start to come naturally.
Keyword density tip: Try not to overuse
your keywords; it won't be very readable if every other word is a
keyword. Writing like this shows search engines that you are only
writing the articles for SEO purposes which search engines don't
like. Try to write good, informative, interesting articles aimed at
users and Google will begin to see you as a reliable source.
Internal Linking
This is when you put keywords in and link them back to one of
your pages on your website that relates to that keyword (for
example - Resource Techniques could say we are writing this article
so Google will pick up on us trying to help Estate Agents with
their Search
Engine Optimisation). Search Engine Optimisation being our
keyword so we have linked the word back to our SEO for Estate
Agents page.
If you put "Estate Agents in (Area)" you could link those words
back to your area profile page or even your office profile page.
This helps Google's crawlers to manoeuvre around the website a lot
easier. Directing them exactly to the places on the website you
want them to go.
How to do this
Once you have typed your article up and putting it onto
RTadmin.co.uk. Choose the words you want to have as links and
highlight them and click on the "Insert/Edit Link" button (in the
Article Body displayed as an Earth with a Link Symbol over it).
Once you've clicked on that a link box will pop up and where it
says URL copy and paste the URL of where you want the link to
go.
Avoid making errors
This is another common mistake where people make spelling errors
or typos. This can be a big deal when you spell your keywords wrong
and you don't show up under the right search term (e.g. Estate
Agents in Landon) you wont show for Estate Agents in London.
Google and most other Estate Agents also can pick up on spelling
errors and you do now get penalised for making them.
This is easily solved by using software with a spell checker
built in such as Microsoft Word.
By Luke Stanley
SEO Consultant
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