Tips for Optimizing your Article for Search Engines

4 mins read

In most cases, traffic to your site will come from search engines. To increase your visibility on search engines, you need to ensure that your website stays at the top and in the first page of results. One of the ways of getting a good ranking is by optimizing the content that you include in your site. The same applies if you are a content writer. If you want people to find and quote your work, you have to ensure that your content is search engine optimized.

Use these tips to ensure that your content performs better on search engines.

Making the Title Search Engine Friendly

You do this by ensuring the keyword is in the title. Incorporating the keyword just once in the title is enough especially if the keyword is long. Where possible, the keyword should be among the first 65 characters in the title.

Short titles are also more search engine friendly. You should keep your title as short as possible. The title should always be related to the content in the article.

Abstract Optimization

When writing your abstract, you should ensure that the keyword appears in the first two sentences. This is because only two sentences will appear on a search engine result. In the entire abstract, you also need to ensure that you include the keyword at least three times. You can add the keyword up to six times in the abstract as long as this is done naturally.

Distribution of Keywords throughout the Article

Aside from the title and the abstract, the rest of your content should have keywords in it. Anything between five and seven times is ideal. The number of times you include the keyword will depend on the length of the keywords.

The length of the keyword matters, as longer keywords tend to be harder to use. Whether the keyword is short or long, it should only be used naturally. This way, the content will flow, and the article will make sense to the intended audience.

Ensure Consistency

It is particularly important when you need to include an author in your publication. The names and initials of the authors you include in the article should be consistent from the beginning to the end. The names and initials also need to be consistent with those used in earlier publications.

Link Building

Link building is all about creating networks. It can be done in many ways. You can link the article to your social media and other networking sites. This will make it easy for friends on these sites to find and read your article. The more inbound links you get, the more Google will pick your content. This will consequently result in a higher ranking on search engines.

You should also work to get links from trusted sites. Ask your friends to link their websites or even their networking sites to your article. It will help broaden your audience and increase your chances of ranking highly on search engines.