This is a guest post by Michael who blogs at coupon and discount blog. He often writes on verybestsoftware.net and Puritan Pride Coupons. If you wish to write one, kindly check out our guidelines to write a guest post.
Every blog owner knows that content is king.
If you want your articles to rank on Google, there are certain steps you must take. Contrary to what we’ve been taught by so-called SEO experts, you don’t need to bite your fingers to achieve results.
In fact, a little step you can take today, can make a huge difference. The web is primarily powered by content, and Google is constantly looking for pages that have the right content for her users. If you provide this content, you would be rewarded with fresh traffic, and increase in pagerank.
The steps required to rank your articles highly on Google top 10 are:
1. Research Your Long Tail Keywords
This is the first approach to take, as it boosts your chances of ranking easily. When you concentrate your effort on long tail keywords (3 – 6 words), you’re going to reap the rewards of Google homepage. I’ve seen new blogs rank highly because the articles focused on long tail keywords. You can’t possibly compete with the giants in the market like Amazon, Wal-mart, and several shopping sites.
When you tour the route of long tail key terms, which these popular websites ignore, you drive targeted traffic, that makes for real conversion.
2. Know Your Market Well
You’ve to determine the actual people you’re serving. Your article should be thinly focused on the exact people. It could be crazy when an article writer tries to target everybody that comes to the internet – I don’t think he’s going to succeed in the first place. As a Google user, know your market in and out.
Participate and answer questions on discussion boards. You would be able to discover amazing questions and concerns of your target market. This positions you to write effectively, thereby pleasing Google and reaping the benefits.
3. Write To One Particular Person
Yes, even though you’ve thousands of people who need to read your content, as a rule of thumb, write only to one person. Channel your sentences to align and attribute to one unique person. This is because, your article is going to be read by one person at a time.
When this is done, your article seems engaging and when that happens, the bounce rate is reduced to the barest minimum.
Before Google can rank your articles, they want to know the extent by which you’ve been able to solve problems. How unique and interesting your content is, would only be determined by the “amount” of time spent by your readers.
4. Write Headlines That Are Short
Not merely short like that, but make sure your headline is 71 characters or less. This is because Google spiders only index the first 71 characters and uses (…) for the remaining section. A perfect SEO content should abide by ranking rules and ensure the headline is cute and short.
If you must write a long headline, make it a sub-heading and use it within the content of the article. It makes a lot of sense because Google reads the entire content.
5. Start With Your Key Phrases
What you are targeting shouldn’t be just keywords. So when you start writing your content, use your key phrases as the initial start-ups. You’re doing this because, search engine spiders read content in the same way as humans. They read from left to right – so when your primary terms are well situated, indexing is faster.
This in turn increases your pagerank on Google without much struggles.
6. Write Quality Content
There is no alternative to writing quality content. It’s not all about the keywords and phrases you used, by how unique and original your content is. The kind of articles that succeeds to the homepage of search engines, are those that are less stuffed with key terms.
Avoid spun contents, they would only hinder your success and jeopardize your search engine optimization endeavors. Take time and create quality content that people love.
Remember, it’s not the search engine that will subscribe to your RSS feed, opt-in to your email list and buy your product, it’s the people that will. Write for people and Google will follow.
Image Credit: drivingtraffic