SEO articles: 11 tips for better content

If you run your own website, you want search engines such as Google, Bing or Yahoo to be able to find it. The competition among website operators to rank as high as possible for frequently used keywords is therefore very high. One way to achieve this is to optimise your content. The following eleven tips show you how to write SEO articles in such a way that search engines rank them as high as possible.

1. Make sure your SEO texts offer value to the reader

There are many measures you can take to optimise texts according to SEO-relevant criteria. However, there’s not much point optimising your content if you don’t think about your readers while doing so. A search engine aims to deliver the best results relating to the user’s search query, putting the reader at the centre of the search experience. To do this, Google, Bing and other search engines rely on algorithms that attempt to assess a website’s relevance for a user. This relevance is largely related to the kind of content a website offers.

SEO-optimised articles should thematically match the search term to which they were optimised, but also be easily readable and offer value to the target group. The best-case scenario would be for the text to contain the answer to the search query. If you want to write SEO articles, you should focus on a certain topic and provide useful information for questions that could be asked about it.

2. Avoid duplicate content in SEO articles

Not only does your target group love new content, but so do search engines. This content should not appear anywhere else and is known as unique content. It’s not unusual to find pre-fabricated product descriptions or pre-formulated press releases and use them on your own website, but at the same time, it usually won’t help you rise to the top of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Duplicate or plagiarised content isn’t just bad taste, it also gets noticed by the search engines and can harm your ranking.

When you’re creating your search engine-optimised website content, you should avoid duplicate content at all costs. Even publishing your own texts several times on your own site falls into this category. That’s because the search engine algorithm attempts to present the user with different content in the search results. If the same content is found on two different URLs, only one will appear in the SERPs, namely the one with the original content.

3. Tailor the scope of your SEO texts to the respective topic

Since Google released its Panda update a new creed has been adopted among SEO circles: content is king. Texts comprising of 200 – 300 words used to be more than enough to gain an adequate ranking position. Now, website owners are finding that they have to write longer SEO articles to achieve a good ranking. The Panda quality update doesn’t just target the scope of your content; search engines like Google use elaborate algorithms to evaluate the information content of a text and determine the value it offers the reader.

This is based on semantic analyses and user metrics such as the average length of a visitor’s stay. Since it’s impossible to constrain every topic to the confines of a predetermined minimum word count, the scope of your SEO text needs to be proportional to the complexity of the relevant topic. More content won’t automatically result in a better ranking. Instead, search engines honor well-researched content with conclusive arguments and reliable sources.

4. Balance your keyword density

Search engines rely on keywords to determine how relevant a website is for a search query. These keywords make it possible to assign a website text to a certain topic area. Wondering how to write an seo article? Before you begin, you should define relevant topic areas for your website and research significant keywords, products or services. It is recommended to cluster keywords in synonymous keyword sets. Each of these clusters is available as a basic framework for a search engine-optimised website.

When integrating keywords into the SEO text, try to keep a balanced keyword density. A keyword distribution of 1-3% is generally recommended. Ultimately it really depends on each individual case as to how you distribute keywords. The person writing the SEO articles should always have the target group in mind and avoid stuffing too many keywords into the text to please the search engine. Instead, it is advisable to use synonyms, variations, topic-relevant terms, and inflection in order to cover the whole semantic field of a topic.

5. Structure SEO articles using design elements

Not only is information-packed content and keyword density a ranking factor for Google, but also dividing the content into sections can help improve the ranking. Headers and sub-headers play a supporting role and are labelled ‘h1’ to ‘h6’ in the HTML code. The most important design feature is the main heading (‘h1’), which has a prominent place in the source code and should contain the main keyword of the text.

Additional keywords are best placed in the sub-headings ‘h2’ and ‘h3’. Divisions past the third hierarchy level are rare and should only be used as an exception if they make the text easier to read. Enumerations and list items can be used instead. Bolding can also be a means of structuring SEO texts, which is implemented by using the HTML tags ‘b’ and ‘strong’. The strong tag tells the search engine that the bolded phrase is relevant.

6. Use internal linking to strengthen your SEO article

As described above, SEO texts are best optimised for a certain topic. Search engine-optimised websites use them in order to manage a web project’s link juice and to strengthen the relevant pages of a domain. Internal and external links can increase the user-friendliness of a site and refer readers to additional information on other websites. Note that every link you add means that the other website is inheriting a portion of your link popularity. Before you start linking to external websites, you should check whether there is a suitable link target on your domain that could be useful. You can use subpages to strengthen your domain if it does not have any links from external websites.

Always make sure to use meaningful link texts with internal and external links so that it makes the thematic allocation easier for the search engine. The ‘nofollow’ attribute should be used when linking to unfamiliar websites. This is an HTML instruction to Google that shows that the external link should not be taken into account when calculating link popularity. The link juice therefore stays on your own domain.

7. Update your SEO texts regularly

Even the best-looking SEO article won’t be of much help if it is out-of-date. The relevance of your website is another ranking criterion for a search engine. Domains, which regularly offer new content on current topics, perform so much better in the SERPs than websites that neglect their content. It is practically impossible for web projects, like online shops or business sites, to regularly re-write product texts, category texts, and descriptions of their range of services. Instead, special news reports, press sections, and integrated blogs on the site can provide new content for visitors.

8. Use multimedia elements to upgrade your SEO texts

Besides structural elements like titles, lists, and bullet points, SEO texts can also be broken up with images and multimedia elements. Multimedia content offers the visitor more value through its audiovisual nature since information is offered via numerous channels. The search engine wants to present its users with the best website possible and, therefore, rates multimedia elements positively. User metrics show that site visitors spend longer on sites with embedded videos and graphics, which then leads to a positive ranking. It is also possible through search engine-optimised images and videos to generate traffic that does not come from an organic web search, but rather through image and video search engines.

In addition to multimedia elements, call-to-actions (CTAs) can also be used to increase the effectiveness of your website. With CTAs, you ask your website visitors to perform a specific action, for example to sign up for a newsletter. CTAs are relevant at several points in the customer journey and are therefore very important for converting website visitors into customers.

9. Optimise your images for SEO relevant criteria

In order to optimise your website for a search engine, you should consider multiple SEO criteria when writing SEO articles. When integrating images and graphics, there are basic rules to follow to guarantee your content can be found using image search. Search engines cannot carry out analyses themselves, so the crawler conveys information to them about what the image entails. If you plan on ranking in the image search, then you need to add the relevant keywords in the file name as well as in the image caption.

Most search engines rate larger images favourably than smaller ones, so make sure they are of high resolution. In order to inform a search engine of what appears in the image, you should add relevant keywords into the image’s HTML code. This applies to the image’s title (title tag) as well as the description (alt tag). The title tag appears when you hover the mouse over the image. The alt tag, however, delivers a short description to the browser, which takes the image’s place if it cannot be shown for technical reasons.

10. Enrich your SEO articles with keyword-optimised meta tags

When a person types a term into a search engine, for example Google or Bing, they will receive a compilation of search results in the form of snippets. These are short text excerpts of individual websites that are always presented in the same way: title, description, and URL. Note that these snippets must be manually written by the text writer to ensure optimal presentation. As a rule, the snippet is the first thing visitors see of your website. It should therefore contain a brief summary of what they would find on your site, not forgetting the main keyword.

To avoid your snippet being shown as incomplete in the search results, it is best to keep the title below 60 characters and the description should contain around 160 characters. You can check whether your snippets are the correct length by using SISTRIX’s free online tool. We present even more useful SEO tools in another article.

11. SEO texts and AI

Generative AI is progressing all the time. Even people without a technical background can have impressive, high-quality texts, images and videos generated by AI models. To have the desired content created, all you need to do is enter the correct AI prompt.

This technology not only enables you to create your web content semi-automatically, but also have it designed in a way that SEO criteria are taken into account. The first step to making your SEO texts more efficient with generative AI is to choose a suitable AI text generator. In another article, we present the best AI text generators to help you decide which best suits your needs. It is worth taking a look at our article on prompt engineering to achieve better results with your chosen AI text generator.