How to Write SEO-Friendly Articles
Notice: This article is intended for startup bloggers willing to write articles and build their blocks. It highlights and focuses on the behind-the-scenes of article preparation in a way to make your article strong, SEO-friendly, and insightful.
When you test the availability of a domain name to be purchased from Godaddy website, a beautiful message will be displayed while waiting for the results saying: This could be the start of something big. Start small but dream big.
If you want to figure out your blogging and SEO strategy, imagine yourself standing alone in wide open space and scream your blog title: Abo Saad Blog for Entrepreneurship and Technology.
You will hear only your echo back and nobody will listen to you. Starting a new blog is like exactly the same. You need a lot of tools to scream effectively and efficiently. Are you ready for that?
If you are following my blog, you might have noticed that I address every subject in my personal way. You might find a lot of articles with the same subject on the Internet but you will never find the view that I'm handling. That is because I don't like consumed ideas and I prefer to address things from the angle I view them after reading a lot and documenting my results.
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| SEO-Friendly Articles |
So, in this article, I'm going to teach the readers how do I prepare my blog articles using Blogger as a platform. Hope you enjoy it.
Content Preparation
Everything we do starts with an idea. Once you find an appropriate idea for blogging within your niche, it will be a chance to write your views and insights about it to inform readers something they don't remember or know. Your idea can help a lot, never underestimate it.
An idea is found. Now the process of refining and evaluating starts with brainstorming and reading. I write the idea on my whiteboard and start plugging related ideas for it in order to refine it, correct it, point it correctly, and target my niche. Targeting in blogging is done by every word you write in your article, by keywords, by internal links, format used, picture name and alternative text, and search terms in the article.
Brainstorming can be done within family, friends, colleagues or by reading similar articles on the internet. Write the headlines in Google and start reading what people are saying about it.
Take notes of that idea, and start filtering the related ideas until you reach the sub-topics you want to cover inside your article.
Next comes the filling or dumping of your description of ideas using the selected keywords repetitively but in an unnoticeable way so that your readers do not get bored from repetition. Try not dump more than three sentences in one paragraph, no matter the subject, unless it is a pure technical content. Use bullets, lists and tabulated items to list points that exceed 3.
Once you finish each sub-article, reread it two times and try to refine it, if necessary. When you finish your article, reread it one time and add/modify/delete ideas accordingly.
I use Excel to list all the articles in one sheet by number, title, status (published or draft), link, and date published.
Another sheet in the same file is used to display a chart showing the number of days between each article to track my speed progress in writing.
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| Content Preparation |
SEO Preparation
There are a lot of SEO strategies to be followed and this is not the right place to discuss them all.
Let's start with On-Page SEO using keywords:
I use Microsoft Excel for my blog to build my own keyword's kingdom within my niche. I use a specific Excel tab and put its related keywords for each article.
Searching for keywords can be perfected using Google Trends and Google Search Page. It's better to follow the trends in the day of launching your article/post so that it gets higher number of clicks and impressions.
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| Keyword Kingdom |
The concept of keywords kingdom/planet/empire is widely spread as it helps content writers to build their own keywords database and perform easy aggregations and computations on the usage and frequency of those keywords. Such methodology give you the flexibility to evaluate your strategy and validate the subscription outputs for your blog with tools like Alexa, Ahrefs and SEMRush, LongTailPro and others.
It's okay if you are not familiar with these tools at startup as it will be mandatory to use one of them sooner or later.
The keywords above are placed in a comma-separated format to facilitate the splitting process using Excel functions. The keywords above are old. I have a newer database currently but it is displayed here for transparency purposes and explanation.
Images Preparation
How do I prepare my images?
Simply, I use several sources like Pexels.com and Google Search Engine. I download free images or free for personal use images. I place them in PowerPoint to add my signature, sometimes, or add some relative description.
Once completed, I use two image processing platforms to reduce image sizes like tinypng.com website and FileOptimizer software.
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| FileOptimizer for Image Size Reduction |
Spreadsheet Preparation
I use one Excel file for all my blog to reduce working time and efficiency in handling data inside one file in one location.
Inside the Excel file, I use one sheet for each article/post, especially if it requires listing points or ideas. This will facilitate reviewing those points whenever you want to revert back and add/modify/delete or in case you have lost your article or erased the content by mistake. Having a backing saves you from the trouble of content re-writing.
Check this Inspirational Quotes article for example.
Slide Preparation
Using any software to track and save your image editing is crucial when you can't organize your files in specific location. For that, I keep all blog images in one PowerPoint file to track any changes made on the pictures and go back to earlier versions if required.
Once you publish posts and test their speed using Google Lightweight or other tools, you can discover a lot of weaknesses, which will force you to go back to your images and re-edit or resize them. Tiny modifications using PowerPoint tools can increase the image size dramatically and this will affect the performance of your blog.
That's a summary of content preparation and that's not a lot. As an entrepreneur planning to monetize your blog and make it one of your income sources, you need to work hard to harvest expected results and output. Once you do this process more than five times, it will become a routine and you can prepare this environment every time you plan to write a new article/post.
