How to Increase SEO on Your Articles
By: Tessa Schlesinger
Tags: Web, Writer, Writing, Internet, SEO

How to Increase SEO on Your Articles

Medium is unique in allowing content writers to be paid for the number of reads they get. Most other sites use advertising, and if people click on an ad that is next to your story, then you get paid a percentage of the ad revenue (normally about 60%). That said, there aren’t many content writing sites left. When Google did their Panda update about eight years ago, virtually all content sites went out of business. Hubpages is one of the few that remain.

What is Search Engine Optimisation?

Google places some articles at the top of their page. Of the 10 articles on each page, the first one gets about 87% of the traffic, the next two about 12% of the traffic, and the remaining 1% about zilch. So if your article is not in the top three, you will get very little traffic sent to you by Google.

One way that big companies get around this is that the advertise. This is called SEM — Search Engine Marketing. The way that works is that Google puts their ad where likely buyers will see it and click on it. It’s expensive, though, and there is a reason why business pays SEO gurus the big bucks to get their article to the top of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page).

If you learn some rules and do some work, there’s no reason why your article shouldn’t get to the top of the Google Serps.

How to Get to the Top of the Google Serps Using SEO

There are several factors that Google looks for before promoting a piece to page one in one of the top three positions. There are actually a lot of them, but for the purposes of this article, these are the main ones.

The topic is the most important one. If you write about something that a lot of people are searching for but nobody has written about, then it’s likely to find its way to the top of the Serps. The difficulty is that just about everything has been written about, and it’s really difficult to know what hasn’t been written about. This is where keyword tools are handy. They will tell you what the competition is for those keywords (topic). The older the internet gets, the longer the longtail keywords be. Your title of your article needs to be a longtail keyword — preferably three of them strung together to make not only a stunning headline, but make sense as well. The more keywords there are in a headline, the more likely Google will push it up the ranks. The difficulty is that the article must be related to the content, and google checks the content. The content of the article needs to have words that are related to each other. For example, if you are writing about diet, then Google will check to see if there are related words, e.g. weight, slim, fat, exercise, food, calories, etc. Your subtitles and titles are important. Generally when a content website is designed, there is an automatic process that puts all H1 (titles) and H2 (subtitles) under the metatags in the opening lines of the webpage (the head). That is why it is very important for all your titles to comprise longtail keywords as well. A longtail keyword is generally a phrase. The longer your story is on the web, the more likely it is to be near the top. That’s because Google assumes that if your article is still being read, that it is good. I have had some of my articles up in the top three for a decade. The length of your article matters. Never write an article less than 1200 words, and the closer you are to 3000 words, the more Google likes it. Have a stunning picture at the top of your article. It is sad but true that it is the picture that draws people to your article. There is also the fact that sites like facebook, Quora, Pinterest, etc. will include the picture with the headline, and it is the number of responses to that picture that will determine how many people open your article to read it. The more people read your article on these sites, the more indication Google has that it is a good article. Link your article to authentic news sources or science magazines. When you do that, Google sees you as an authoritive writer. A lot of people are still focused on backlinks, but some of my articles have zero backlinks, and are still in the top three. The secret is to link your articles to wiki, to the BBC, to WSJ, to academic sites, etc. That lends credence to you as a writer.

So those are the basics. As you get more experienced, you will learn more. You should, however, do pretty well on getting to at least page 1 of Google if you apply the above rules.

So what do you get out of it?

There are Medium members who search for things, and if they find your article, you will be paid. All my articles that have ranked on Google are also paying me better than other articles. You can learn about affiliate marketing and earn an income that way. However, be aware that Google doesn’t like sites where there are a lot of affiliate articles, and Medium pretty much doesn’t like it. They allow it, though, if you put on a notice saying that you will earn from any sales. You may want traffic to Medium for some other reason — sign ups, etc. In that case, it’s a win situation all around.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.