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