As part of our SEO training, the module most accessible to candidates is undoubtedly the one that concerns the writing of your pages and articles.
Writing for the web and structuring an article for search engines is far from out of your reach.
It is a writing discipline to impose on you, a few habits to adopt that will help Google to better understand your point thanks to clear “signals” and to favor it in the SERPs because it will correspond to its references.
And if not everyone can claim to be a “fine SEO writer”, the application of these few basic principles will make the difference with competing texts that do not apply them.
The parameters to be defined before writing the text,
as a benchmark
- The general key phrase of the page (for the cue it brings in the writing process and the final consistency check)
- <Title>: 65 characters maximum (intended for the SERP)
- The / this-is-url/: a simplified variant of the h1 in 3/4 words without the stop-words
- The meta description: Eye-catching text in up to 230 characters since December 2017. (for the SERP)
- The alt tag of the image: short and clear
- The h1 i.e. the real title of the article, the one that will be displayed on the page
- The lexical field of the key expression
References for writing articles
Small articles will be no less than 600 words
Large thematic articles or founding pages will be 800 to 1500 words or more.
Quality of content
The content is expressed with simplicity.
We prefer the present tense, short sentences, synonyms, paraphrases rather than repetitions. We are looking for a great wealth of vocabulary.
We don’t repeat a keyword, a key expression, we treat the subject with the intention of making it clear and exciting, relevant, useful.
We dig into the lexical field what is appropriate to use.
We also refer to Adwords and/or paid tools such as Samourai, Semrush etc, with logic and wisdom in the inspirations drawn.
Quality of the subject
The text you publish must provide an answer to the user’s query WITHOUT the user needing to ENGAGE YOU, because in the first place, this is what they are looking for.
If your point is clear and erudite, he will call you when he realizes that he cannot do the job without a pro.
Work on your writing to give
- clear information,
- an answer to a question,
- a way out of a problem.
Structure the article
First of all, structure the editorial team with:
- A “chapô” introduction in which we find the main information summarized in a paragraph of 55/75 words
- At least one photo, two or three won’t hurt, write the alt tag
- Paragraphs with title (h2) and possibly subtitle (h3). These titles are short, but written, they contain the important phrases of the subject dealt with in the paragraph, they are catchy.
In 500 words, there will be at least three paragraphs and a conclusion in the form of a summary.
Ventilate the text and reading
- Line break every 3 lines,
- Use bulleted list with short sentences, not a list of words
- Don’t use bold on an entire sentence, but on a short group of words.
Write with internal mesh in mind.
In the discourse, we will deliberately mention other articles on the site that belong to the same category, the same theme and make links to these papers.
Link anchors will clearly evoke the content of the article, these anchors will be varied from one article to another.
Go and mesh the latest articles from the old pages published on the site.
Send external links
Making links to other sites gives credibility to your message, enriches it, and provides it with additional information. “External linker ” is also about being in tune with the original spirit of the Internet: sharing information. Put these links in “_blank”.
Choose your media
- Towards quality texts, even if their AD is low.
- To reference sites, but not always the same (not always Wikipedia, or the site of the order of your profession…)
- To blogs from colleagues who are in competition with you… on another terrain, another geographical area. YES, DARE! You only lose visits in your head and make friends.
Think Marketing
Of course, you are there to sell your services, your products.
One or more links will take the user to the sales pages or your conversion funnel (products, services, testimonials, benefits, guarantees, purchase orders, etc.).
An ad block [an image] with a link will do the same type of work, but will be placed in such a way as to air out the text, bring it color and an additional incentive.
Your phone number will be mentioned [with click to call], possibly your brand and address (with microformats).
Write the excerpt of your articles
The excerpt is technically a second Chapô, an introduction reporting all the information contained in the page and in the event that your site/blog offers a field to write an excerpt, don’t neglect this precious advantage, because if your platform is well configured, it is this catchy summary that will be aggregated in your “archive” pages.
Your pages, categories or tags (for example) become unique because they are composed of text that is independent of the content of the articles to which they refer.
Processing “Archives” pages (Categories and possibly tags)
This is applicable to the “archive” pages that you decide to index (the subject is vast).
- Introduce each category with a 150-word introductory text. Use the vocabulary that will be found in the articles. They will aggregate the excerpts rather than the first words of each article.
- Fill in the title> fields <and meta description
- The title of each aggregated article will be in h2 rather than h1
- Read this article on optimizing category pages
If you, website owners…
… Please take the trouble to apply these simple and common sense instructions, you will make a clear difference with your colleagues and competitors.
By providing substantiated information and vocabulary in line with your business, by structuring your message to make it clear and pleasant to read, by emphasizing certain signals without being clumsy, search engines will understand your expertise and reward your effort with well-deserved positioning.