What Is Your Article Writing Routine?

I have just recently started to writing articles online. I have long been publishing on print, and the jump to the online media is not yet complete for me. Things as SEOs are still beyond my comprehension. Do you write with the keywords in mind or your keywords appear after you have written your article.

I still follow my routine in print: Working title, outline, the drafts, and the final copy.

I am unsure how to fit SEOs into this yet.

 

How to fit SEO into the your whole routine, you ask? Simple. Here's how:

• Add your main keyword to your title
• Add keywords to the outline
• Add long-tail keywords while your at it
  
• For your final copy, try linking two of those keywords to your website.
• Add keywords to the meta tags on your HTML code (in case you intend to publish the articles on a specific page on your website)

 

For SEO purposes you only really need to focus on sticking to the main points and setting them out clearly. Your article should not be too short. It should have an introduction and a conclusion.

I don't always write the intro first and the conclusion last. Sometimes it helps to write a conclusion first and get all the main points into the body of the article. I spend more time on the opening sentences because those are the most important. If you don't grab the reader's attention and make them want to read on, you could lose a lot of them quickly and a high bounce rate is bad for SEO.

I usually have keywords in mind when I start my first draft. I will use the main one in the title, the opening paragraph and the closing paragraph. It can appear anywhere within the body of the article too, but if you write naturally you will be generating relevant keywords anyway and it will not be penalized by Google for being keyword stuffed.

 

I never write in a set order. I just tend to sit and type as the ideas come to me, then worry about keyword placement and titles after the main body of the article is written. Like Rube says, this way the keywords come maturally and I don't have to spend too much time thinking about them.

 

I don't do SEO at all. If you're writing about something and you write well anyway, the appropriate keywords will almost certainly appear in your text. You'll also be writing for the future (assuming you're doing evergreen content) - search algorithms are constantly evolving and "forced" SEO will become less and less useful as natural language algorithms evolve. Less to worry about when Google decides to invent the Poodle Update, or Platypus, or Potato, or whatever!

That said, if your client wants a specific keyword used, it's worth checking that it appears when you're done!

 

If you’re familiar with even a handful of author biographies, then you know this: There’s no single recipe for becoming a writer. For every party-loving Fitzgerald, there’s an Emily Dickinson who stayed at home. There’s the self-taught Ray Bradbury and the PhD-holding Toni Morrison. There are atheists, church-goers, world travelers and home state loyalists.