How to Write Articles for Free Traffic

Crazy week here at Internet Independence…I made an emergency trip to Colorado to see a business partner and poor ol’ Rick Porter has been without power for a few days.

The last I heard from him he was sitting outside a Panera Bread restaurant in Rhode Island sneaking their wi-fi and he was down to his last hour of laptop battery power.

Kind of reminds me of a scene from a classic Stephen King novella called, “The Mist” (a great read…but I’m not sure about the movie version made a couple of years back – although it has good ratings on RottenTomatoes.com).

Fortunately, I have a stockpile of great info from Rick Porter, including this article that explains how you should structure the keywords in your title, the keyword density, etc. when writing articles for Search Engine Optimization.

I’m following this advice when writing for our “10,000 visitors per day” mission on our new site, www.WorkoutManuals.com

Alright, over to Rick with…

“How to Write Articles for More Traffic”

By Rick Porter

It still amazes me how other “seo experts” out there are still completely missing the boat on onsite optimization.  There are link
builders out there calling themselves “seo experts”.

One SEO expert recently asked me to look at one of his niche websites as he wasn’t ranking even in the top 100.  I was astounded at how horribly optimized the site was.  It was actually embarrassing to see how poorly the site was setup.

So even though he is charging a lot of money for ‘seo services’ to build backlinks, he can’t even optimize his own site which means he can’t even
figure out why his own clients sites are getting stuck.

Seriously.

Don’t just trust anyone just because they say they do “SEO”, because to a lot of people that merely equates to link building and they couldn’t optimize a website to save their life, or make a sale for that matter.

Now let’s talk about on-site optimization. That simply means what you do when you put content on your website and make little tweaks to the headline and content so that it shows up in the top rankings for Google Searches. This is a big part of Search Engine Optimization.

If I’m trying to write a super optimized post that I want ranking top 3 in Google I follow this format

1) Keyword in the title of the post

keep the keyword in the beginning of the title and try to keep the
density of the keyword in the title high.

Really long titles that grab attention don’t necessary rank well in
the search engines for competitive keywords.

To rank high really fast just make the keyword the title.

Most would argue that your click through ratio will be very low, BUT unless you are ranking in the top 3 you don’t need to worry much about click through ratio, so I focus on getting the ranking first and then then modifying the title second.

2) Use the keyword in the first sentence.

Google has to score what an article is about by a fairly simple algorithm.

If you were going to speak to someone about a topic, wouldn’t it be normal to mention the topic in your first sentence?  That’s sort of how the search
engine looks at it.

If it sees the same word in the title and the first sentence it knows there is some importance there.  An strong opening statement is most likely going to introduce what something is about so put your keyword in the first sentence.

3) I try to use the keyword every 100-150 words…

…but to keep from sounding robotic use variations of the keyword that would sound natural, the good think about this is you will pick up long tails at the same time.  If my keyword was ‘bodyweight exercises’ I wouldn’t just keep repeating ‘bodyweight exercises’ over and over.

I would look to see what are the other long tails searched around that keyword.  To quickly find out just open up the Google search bar and start typing in your keyword, the Google suggest will start
to suggest keywords.

It’s a really good idea to put these keywords into your articles because chances are many people will click on the long tail suggestion that Skynet,
I mean Google, is giving to them.

I would even go as far as creating 1 article per suggested keyword and linking them together.  So going back to the keyword ‘bodyweight exercises’ I might write a phrase about ‘bodyweight exercises for women’ or ‘bodyweight exercises for strength’ or ‘bodyweight exercises for chest’ – the point is, you can make your post sound much more natural, AND pick up long tail search phrases.

To take it 1 step farther, link the long tail keyword like ‘bodyweight exercises for strength’ to it’s own article titled ‘bodyweight exercises for strength’ – this strategy is a knock punch when creating a niche site.

It’s what Google wants to see, and it provides a great user experience by having 1 article link to other relevant articles…

…(see Wikipedia – although you don’t have to make every single word a link
- but that’s why they rank #1 for words like ‘spaghetti’, ‘ninja’, and ‘jedi mind trick’ (yes, those are the first 3 words that came to my mind, and yes I did check to see if they ranked #1, and yes I just set an appointment with my
therapist….)

- Seriously, they are starting to rank #1 for just about any word you can think of just because the site has the biggest internal linking network in the world.  This is when I started paying a lot of attention to Wikipedia, when anything I searched I found a Wikipedia entry in the top 3.

If you want to check your keyword density there is a really useful SEO plugin that I use all day long to analyze competitors webpages

– http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/

You can use this plugin to check keyword density, meta tags, keywords, backlinks, page rank, whois, etc.  very handy tool for SEO reconnaissance before planning your search and destroy mission to beat your competitors.

4) Use the keywords in Headers like H2 and H3.

When you read an article and it’s a big block of 1000 words of text without any breaks it can be tough to read.  Headers like H2 and H3 are focal points for the eyes that help to break up this text and point out important subjects within the article.

Googles algorithm recognizes these focal points of importance so it makes note the words in those headers – put the keywords in the headers, and again, use long tails because then your article will rank higher on those long tail keywords.

5) Use the keyword in the last sentence.

A good closing sentence is usually going to mention again what the article was about.

Again the Google algorithm is scoring on this so try to squeeze the keyword in your closing statement.

6) use the keyword in a picture.

One thing I always see on my clients sites is cool pictures, but most people
didn’t know you can actually tell Google what the picture is about.

It’s called the ‘alt tag’ – you can give your picture an alt tag and it’s like another place to squeeze your keyword in.  There is a free plugin called SEO Friendly Images – this is a plugin that will set the alt tags on all your pictures to the title of your post.

So if you have a blog with hundreds of pictures and you don’t have time to go optimize them you can simply install this plugin and it will give each picture an alt tag according to the title of your post.

7) Make the keyword density of your URL as high as possible – you want a shorter more exact link.

For example: you might have a title of a post “How Bodyweight Exercises Changed My Life”

the URL would be

yourdomain.com/how-bodyweight-exercises-changed-my-life

BUT you can edit the URL to this

yourdomain.com/bodyweight-exercises

If that post is going to be your ‘Go To’ post to rank #1 for a keyword, make sure to optimize the URL.

the suburl /how-bodyweight-exercises-changed-my-life has 35 letters, of which ‘bodyweight exercises’ only accounts for 18 of those letters – so the density is 50% – so if you are a computer scoring on an algorithm you would say that ‘bodyweight exercises’ is only 50% of the importance because the words how changed my life must also be important.

On the other hand…

this suburl /bodyweight-exercises has 100% keyword density in the suburl – Google knows that bodyweight exercises must be really important.

You can go back to old posts and edit the URL – if you have your blog setup correctly WordPress should automatically redirect
traffic to the new URL.

If you have a keyword that has been stuck for a while try this little tweak and see if you gain a few spots up in the rankings just by doing this.

8] Get some backlinks from your own site just like Wikipedia does.

If my keyword was bodyweight exercises I would go to some of my old posts and link the keyword ‘bodyweight exercises’ to that new post.

If I didn’t have any posts with that keyword I would edit a couple to make the addition so that I could include some internal linking.

There are a few automated solutions for this.  Fee plugin SEO Smartlinks, there is also a paid version that has a lot of features and is recommended for larger sites but for a small niche site the free plugin is perfect.  I personally use Autolinkjuicer because off all the boosting and tracking features it has.

9) Do not think about any of these rules when you write.

Just write the post naturally in your voice and then go back and do minor edits.  This is one reason Craig and I are a good team, he writes amazing content and doesn’t think about all these SEO rules.

Then I go in and make minor edits afterwords that don’t change the content or the voice.  The end result is we are getting our keywords on page 1 in Google in usually 24-48 hours.  There are some other factors involved like building links, but the power of a
well optimized article cannot be beat.

*****************

More classic Rick Porter.

Crazy what this guy gives away.

Back to normal on Thursday,

Craig Ballantyne

Learn from highly respected people what makes them tick. – Frank McKinney