What do you do when you write an article?

[NewPokerGirl]

I wondering what you guys do when you add content to your sites- SEO wise. I know "an article" is pretty vague but lets just say it's a general strategy article or a news story...nothing that is going to be a big hit.

[ThePokerBank]

I can't say I've ever actually written an article with SEO in mind, and I have found that a lot of my articles are currently ranking quite well for search terms after they have got out of the supps. I am always thinking about the reader rather than Google (probably because I don't actually know too well what Google wants anyway).

If anything, I have a tendancy to use the title of the article within the actual content quite a bit, along with other variants of the title so that I don't repeat the same thing over and over again. I don't do it on purpose, but I assume that this probably helps with SEO.

For example, if I am writing an article about 'bankroll management', I will use those words quite frequently along with other variants like 'money management' and 'controling your bankroll' so that I don't keep on repeating the same thing over and over to make the article read strangely. I guess this helps when people search for things slightly different to the simple 'bankroll management'.

I also write articles around about 1000 words instead of the typical 500. This is because I don't feel I could write an article about a poker topic and be able to explain it properly and cover everything if I limit myself to 500 words. I think with 1000 words you can get the majority of what you want to talk about into the article, without providing the visitor with an overwhelming amount of info that looks incredibly daunting to read. I have visited links to articles with 1500+ words and the majority of the time I click off half way through unless I am really interested in what the writer has to say. I think the advantage of 1000 words over 500 is that you have more room to fit more keywords in that Google can pick up when someone searches something that is a little different to the actual title of the page.

Other than that I just h1 the title and throw in an image to accompany it and alt tag that as the same name as the title. I guess these things help a little with the rankings, but then again these arent directly related to the content.



EDIT: Didnt see the poll, so I guess most of that is kind of off topic^^

But yeah, I do link to other pages If I found I have the correct anchor text in the content relating to a page of the same name. I also scan through a few other articles relating to the new article to see if I can add a link into the article for the new page with good anchor text. I rarely get backlinks pointing to it from other sites.

[kaus]

I write it than when I am finished I start the other stuff and make sure now that my title tag is relevant, my h1 tag is on topic, than if I can use an h2 tag I will do that as well.

If there is a keyword that could relate to something else I link back to the otehr page. i also start submitting to SBM's or other non spam forms to just add something to it. If this works I dont know but the backlinks in some of them do show up in google analytics so why not keep doing it.

Write it as if you actually want someone to read it than work on the other stuff for the serps.....although maybe someone else can chime in I am not sure how many people end up converting based on articles.

[LadyHoldem]

If it's news, I pretty much write it and forget it, news engines take care of making sure someone finds it.

If it's blog stuff, again google blog's will get it indexed pretty fast, and i'll probably get a few b-links from the rss feeds. I will though, first add a couple links to my other inside pages from the article, especially if i'm following up on something that already happened.

I'll go through it add some keywords and tags, as Kaus said above, same with my static pages... then I check my keywords for percentages, because I can get carried away.

If I think it's 'catchy', like controversial, or something people are going to be excited to read, I digg it, or stumble it.

The last thing I tend to do, which should be the first thing.. is read it outloud, generally because my husband or someone wandered by, and I want them to hear it.. when you read outloud, you find all of those crazy little errors.. so i edit .. errrm about an hour after publishing :O lol

LadyH

[edmc]

I just write with an idea of keywords in mind.

If they dont fit my ramblings, they dont get much attention.

finish story.

rehash it, if I still dont see a place for the keywords when Im trying to seo them , tough, they dont get in. I just write another. Now I have 2.

1) content
2) seo
3) link name
4) links

[mftpg]

Like the 'reading aloud' tip - thanks Lady! Also leave at least an hour after writing to go back and proof read.

Use the H1, H2 and Alt tags for pics - also bold some keywords inside the article and add a couple of extra **** keywords relevent to the title.

Just a couple of extra bits, I have at least 2 'related articles' for each (in addition to any linked within the article text). Also try to give readers something to do at the end of each one... visit a room (obv!), go to another section of the site etc etc.

Finally I like to have 'part #1' in the title where possible, lets people know there are more (or at least will be more!!).

Cheers, Mark

[J S]

the first thing i do after deciding what kind of article I'm going to write is do some keyword research. I'll write down a list of keywords / phrases and just make sure that I keep them in mind while writing the article. Often times the initial keyword research will point me in directions for plenty of new articles as well.

For the OP's question about seo'ing a random news story or article, nothing that is going to be 'huge', you use these pieces of content to target some discreet long tail keyword phrase that you've uncovered with little competition, as well as link out to your other relevant content.