Easy SEO Review Tips That Will Get Your Articles Noticed
- Authors Aflame
- Jul 26, 2019
- 7 min read
Updated: Sep 20, 2019
By Heather Hart
After your article is written, it’s always a worth-while idea to go back through to do an SEO review. This final check can help your article get noticed and provide a competitive edge.
One key fact to remember when it comes to SEO, is that most SEO experts recommend writing your content for readers, not search engines. This means search engine optimization should be done during the review process, not the writing process.
Finding Your Focus Keyword/Phrase
Based on what you’ve written, you can discover the best keyword or phrase for your article by doing some basic keyword research. There are some great tools available for this research. Here are three:
Hint: You can also take notes of secondary keywords and phrases as these are important for your article’s SEO as well.
When you go back through to add keywords, they should flow naturally with your content, be unforced. Adding too many keywords, or “keyword stuffing,” can hurt your ranking in the search results.
Now you know what not to do when it comes to SEO, here are a few tips for getting it right.
8 Tips For SEO Review
1. Use Secondary Keywords
In addition to your main keyword or phrase, you should also be using secondary keywords/phrases. These are known as LSI (or Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords. LSI keywords help search engines determine what your article is about.
Look at the following example for an article with the keyword “Pocahontas.” Secondary keywords such as “Powhatan” and “the real story of Pocahontas” will help search engines realize your article is about the historical person; not the Disney movie.
2. Make Sure You Use Your Keywords In Your Headings & Subheadings
Using keywords or phrases in your headings and subheadings is a must. This helps readers who are skimming your article as well as the search engines which are crawling it. Headings are broken down by levels, starting at H1 and ending at H6. The “H” stands for heading, while the number represents the level (one being the highest). You will want to use your focus keyword/phrase in at least one H2 (or higher) subheading. Then use it along with secondary keywords/phrases in any other subheadings as both are important to SEO.
3. Use Your Keywords In The Body Of Your Article
How long your article is affects how many times you should use your keyword or phrase within it. This is called “key phrase density.” The recommended key phrase density is 0.5% to 3%iii or four times for every thousand words.
However, what it all comes down to is that you should add your keywords/phrases and LSI keywords into your article wherever they can flow naturally. If you use too many keywords, you risk search engines viewing you as a “keyword stuffer” – someone who is trying to game the system; i.e., write for bots, not readers. You also risk losing readers because your writing no longer feels natural.
The soundest advice for using keywords in the body of your text is to make sure you’ve done so without forcing it. At the end of this article, you’ll discover an excellent tool for balancing keywords in your articles.
4. Use Your Keyword or Phrase In The Headline Or Title Of Your Article
Using your keyword or phrase in the headline or title of your article is important for two reasons. First, it tells readers what your article is about. Second, it lets search engines correctly categorize your article for search results. Both are of the utmost importance.
For SEO, it is beneficial for your keyword or phrase to be at the beginning of your title/headline. If you’re using HTML for editing your article, you’ll use a title tag for this and place it within the head tags. You can see an example below.
<head>
<title> Title With Keyword or Phrase Here </title>
</head>
Your title tag should be between 50-60 characters. While there is no official standard for article title length, if your title is too long, it’ll get cut off when displayed in search results.
5. Add Relevant Links
When doing your SEO review, it is invariably a good idea to include at least two links back to other articles on your website.
These should be articles on a similar or relevant topic, linked through keywords or phrases. This will show the search engine crawlers your website consists of other valuable information in your niche.
6. Use Keywords In Alt Image Attributes
Before publishing your online articles, you’ll want to include pictures. When performing your SEO review, you’ll also want to ensure your pictures have keywords in their alt image attributes. The alt image attributes are part of the HTML coding of the article. However, most website platforms allow you to add alt image attributes without switching to HTML mode.
For instance, when you upload an image on WordPress, they have areas where you can add the following:
📷 Alt Text
📷 Title
📷 Caption
📷 Description
After it is uploaded and inserted into your article, you can further edit the alt text and image size. As well as address where you would prefer the image to link to (if anywhere).
The important part for SEO is to use your main keyword or phrase in at least one of the images in your article. However, every article you publish online should have at least two graphics with keywords or phrases in their alt image attributes.
7. Use the Keyword Or Phrase In The URL
After you’ve written your article and you’re preparing to publish it online, you’ll need to set the permalink or URL for the article. Each article has its own unique URL.
What’s most important for SEO is the article URL contains the focus keyword or phrase for that article.
8. Use Your Keyword/Phrase In The Meta Description
Last, but not least, is the meta description for your article. In WordPress, you can write this in the “Excerpt” section. If you use a platform like SBI (Solo Build It), you’ll enter the meta description in the page information section.
Now you know some basic SEO review tips that can offer your articles a competitive edge. Next, let’s look at some SEO review tools that can help you on your way.
3 SEO Review Tools
1. Yoast SEO Plugin
The Yoast SEO plugin is a WordPress plugin. There is both a free and paid version. The free version provides amazing SEO tips. In addition to the standard SEO review, it also performs some readability checks.
Here’s what the free version of Yoast has to offer:
For every article you author, it allows you to choose a focus keyword or phrase. Then, it analyzes your article and gives you the results.
It checks for…
💻 Internal links
💻 Outbound links
💻 SEO title width
💻 Key phrase length
💻 Meta description length
💻 Text/article length
💻 Image alt attributes
💻 Key phrase in introduction
💻 Key phrase density
💻 Whether or not you’ve used the key phrase before
💻 Key phrase in slug
💻 Key phrase in title
💻 Key phrase in subheading
Additionally, it allows you to manually revise your article’s
💻 SEO Title
💻 Slug
💻 Meta Description
As mentioned above, it also checks for readability. Analyzing your post for details like having three consecutive sentences that start with the same word; how long your paragraphs are, and how many subheadings you used to break up your text.
Overall, the Yoast SEO plugin is an excellent tool. Don’t feel like you must always follow its recommendations, because you write for people, not computers. However, it’s a great resource for reviewing SEO and can help you see where you can improve the SEO of your articles.
2. Coschedule Headline Analyzer
The Coschedule Headline Analyzer is another free tool that you can use for optimizing your articles. This is something you would use after your article is written and you know what your keyword or phrase is. You can use this tool to come up with the best headline for your article. The kind of headline that will captivate readers.
The Coschedule Headline Analyzer analyzes headlines based on the words you used and how they’d be perceived by readers. It also offers tips on how you can make your headline better — notifying you if you’re using too many words or characters, or if your headline is too short. It reminds you that headlines should include searchable keywords/phrases and which of the words would be recognized as keywords in your title.
This tool also provides an overall score for your headline using a color rating system. Red (50 and below) is bad, yellow (anything in the 60s) could be better, and if you get green (70 and above) you’re good to go. You can see some examples from the headline for this article below:
3. Rob Hammond SEO Crawler
After publishing your articles, you may want to go through with a free tool like Rob Hammond’s SEO Crawler to do an SEO review of your website. This can help you recognize any issues you might’ve missed before publication. You don’t need to do this every time you publish an article. However, you might want to do it after your site launches, then maybe again every few months.
Conclusion
So, there you have it. Eight easy SEO review tips that will help your articles get noticed. Plus, three SEO review tools that can assist you on your journey. Now that you’re armed with this knowledge and these resources, you should be prepared to publish articles that maintain a competitive edge.
While plugins such as Yoast SEO are helpful, they aren’t for everyone. You can always make your own SEO review checklist to make sure you’ve covered all the aspects of SEO in your articles.
Here’s an example of what a good SEO checklist could look like:
💻 Choose Your Focus Keyword/Phrase For The Article
💻 Use The Main Keyword/Phrase in The Article Title
💻 Identify & Use Secondary Keywords & Phrases In the Article
💻 Use The Main Keyword/Phrase & Secondary Keywords & Phrases In Subheadings
💻 Add At Least Two Internal Links To Relevant Articles On Your Website
💻 Add Images With Alt Image Attributes (Use Keywords/Phrases)
💻 Write A Meta Description That Includes The Main Keyword/Phrase
💻 Use The Main Keyword/Phrase In The URL
Doing SEO review can make or break your online articles when it comes to search engines. Take the time to do it right, and you can’t go wrong. Choose the tools you want to use or make your own SEO checklist for your online articles, so you are set up for success.
Heather Hart — Author Coach
Heather has a passion for helping other writers make their dreams come true. With well over a dozen books in print, she has been working as an author coach for close to a decade.
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