How to write a great SEO article...

Before I came into SEO industry, I used to wonder why some of the pages on the web show up in the results again and again. I now know that Google is not intelligent, it is pseudo-intelligent. It picks up content based on what it thinks is the best match for the search. So when I wrote my first ever article, which was actually a tutorial, I wrote an article on a very niche topic, and I got it to rank right on the first page, and it was searched a lot because it was a new and upcoming topic in programming world. And it still ranks among the top articles for that search just because more and more people clicked through that article when they searched for it, and hence Google attached more and more relevancy to it.

So I started writing articles just for the sake of ranking, and I was surprised how I was not able to do what I wanted to do. Some of the posts even on this blog were written by me keeping traffic in mind. But I realized very quickly that it won’t work. The information that I want to provide was driven by keywords rather than the idea of writing a post. One of the most important things I realized was that I cannot rank for everything. We have to write something because we want to communicate an idea, and if the idea is good enough to rank in the search engines, it will.

I rank well for most of the articles written on this blog. I just searched for few, and I found out that I ranked well for articles when the article content had what is required when users searched for it. Imagine how would users search for something? What are they looking for? That is the way you would want to go about writing articles which are really “SEO” based, rather than stuffing articles with keywords, and phrases which are most searched for. Below is an example blog from this site:

There is another side to it though. Writing articles for search engines and for article directories is a different game altogether. We are feeding parts of the Internet about the data, and we are searching for relevant backlinks while doing that, I assume that we can use of knowledge of keywords and phrases there.

Lots of times, writers write according to what people ask them to write. But SEO writers should assume the role of consultant sometimes, and they should advise what is best for the client, instead of blindly doing what they ask us to do. I will gather some more points in the next one.

..to be continued