Tips For Writing Helpful Articles That Readers Love

Some people do SEO article writing. Others write articles that readers really love. The trick is to combine the two and write articles that are keyword focused but that still make sense and appeal to human readers.
I’m sure you’ve seen SEO articles that were anything but appealing. They were loaded with a certain phrase that was repeated very conspicuously throughout the article. The sentence phrasing was awkward and hard to understand. The article looked as if it had been written by a machine and not a real human being!
These are not the type of SEO articles that you wan to produce. You can do so much better than that!
Just use these 5 very simple SEO article writing tips that any beginner can execute, and you’ll be writing articles that your readers (and Google!) will love.
Step #1: Research one keyword phrase to target in your article.
This will be a long-tail keyword phrase. A long-tail phrase is usually 3 to 8 words long. There is not a lot of competition for this phrase, so it will be relatively easy for your article to rank highly in the search engine rankings.
Step #2: Create an interesting title that uses this phrase.
Any time you use keywords in a title or article, they must be placed in appropriate context and sound natural. So, your title should sound natural and be grammatically correct. It should also be appealing to human readers.
Try to think of phrasing that a person might type into Google and craft your title after that.
For example, many people type ‘how to do xyz’ in the search box, so you could turn your title into a “how to”. Also, many times people type a question into Google, so you might try forming your title into a question.
Keep in mind that your title must be interesting to a human reader, be grammatically correct, and make sense.
Step #3: Write an article that is useful to your readers.
Keep your eyes on the prize for now–your goal is to write valuable content that your readers will love. Forget about your keywords just now–just write an educational article.
The ultimate thing that makes your article valuable in Google’s eye and your reader’s eyes is the helpfulness of the content. Keywords do not mean anything if the article does not contain information that readers can use.
The article content must deliver on what the title promised. For example, if your title is “How to Teach Your Baby to Read in 5 Steps”, then the article must present 5 steps that can be used in teaching a baby to read.
Step #4: Focus on creating timeless content.
Write an article that has relevance beyond this month and this year. If your article topic is evergreen, then people will be searching for information on that topic for years to come.
Step #5: Develop a list of phrases that are variations of your original keyword phrase.
For example, if the phrase you are targeting is “buying a puppy”, semantically related variations of that phrase would be:
* buy a puppy
* buying puppies
* where to buy puppies
* where to buy a puppy
* how to buy a puppy
You get the idea! Google recognizes related variations of phrases, so it is not necessary or desirable to repeat the same phrase throughout your article.
Take your list of semantically related phrase variations and choose a few to put in your article in a natural sounding way. You don’t want to force a phrase in the article–it should fit naturally in the context of your content and be grammatically correct.
Writing articles for SEO takes planning, strategy, creativity, and self-control. You are playing to both sides–you need to see your article from a human being’s standpoint and also create content that would appeal to a search engine.
When writing SEO articles, your goal is always to create content that is helpful and interesting to human readers. It takes time, but if you do your SEO article writing correctly, the piece of content that you create can draw search engine traffic to your website for many years.