Skip to main content

Writing Articles for the Web

Written by adminCGT on .

When writing articles for publishing to the web, there are a number of factors to consider to help improve your website rankings. The following five tips will all help towards improving your Website Rankings when writing for the web:

Keywords/Keyphrases

Keyword or keyphrase selection and placement are crucial.

  • Your chosen keyword or key phrase should appear in the first paragraph of the copy to make sure the topic is clear immediately.
  • The keyword/keyphrase density should be between 3 & 6 times.
  • The keyword/keyphrase should appear in the URL
  • Any images in the article should contain alt tags with the target keyword/phrase.
  • Try to use the keyword/keyphrase subheadings in the copy, as this can be beneficial to rankings.

Page Title

  • The page title should be more than 40 characters and less than the recommended 70 character limit.
  • The page title should contain the keyword/phrase, at the beginning which is considered to improve rankings.

Meta Descriptions

When writing an article for publication to your own website make sure you complete the meta description field and that this contains the primary keyword/phrase. When writing this, consider how this description compares to the competition? Could it be made more appealing? Make sure it contains information that is relevant to that particular article.

Article length and appearance  

Try to ensure that the article length is greater than 300 words, as this helps your website ranking.

For really long articles it may be worthwhile splitting them up into a teaser or abstract section and then having one or more follow on sections, so enticing the reader to read the complete article, rather than presenting them with the whole thing in one go, which could be off-putting. Use of bullets and numbered lists make copy easier and quicker to read. These are covered in greater depth in a previous related article 8 Tips for Effective Web Site Copywriting.

Breaking text up into sections with relevant keywords used in Section Headings also helps search engines and will be beneficial to your rankings.

Links    

Make sure any links contained in the article work and are relevant to the subject matter. Having good quality internal and external links in an article is beneficial but don’t overdo it, otherwise, you may find your website penalised. Once your article has been published it is worthwhile periodically checking that these links still work, in case what they were linked to when published has been removed or moved. Remember, bad links and backlinks from poor quality websites can have a detrimental effect on your rankings.