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How to Construct an Optimized Article

One major reason to blog and add content pages to your website is for the boost it can give you in search engine rankings. The better your content is and the more of it there is, the better your ranking will be in the long run.

But there is more to a good article or blog than just words and a picture. The structure of the blog post itself and what you include within the content is just as important.

Length

It is recommended that a blog post be at least 400 words long. If you can get it to 600 words that is even better. Any super-long post you have, you may want to break up into parts (blog post name part I and blog post name part II for example).

Headers and Labels

You will want the header or label text to be bold font. You will want to use your header tags for these page section titles. H1 Tag is for the overall title of the page You will be using that tag on-page. You can use H2 tags and H3 for the paragraph titles within the article body. See image below:

Outbound Links

The standard practice in 2020 is to write your blog or article with at least two outbound links. Your outbound links can point to “authority sites” which are sites that are already ranked well and are considered to be well established. You want to point to an article that has similar content or helps define a keyword.

You will also want a lateral link in your blog or article. This is a text link that points to another page within your own site.

Images

You want to include at least one image in your blog or article. Make sure you fill in the backside information when adding the image. You want to add the “alt text” and the image description. This helps search engines decide what your content is about and where to rank it. You should look at this as an extra opportunity to use some of your keywords.

Keywords

Make sure that you use the keywords from you article title at least several times within the body.  This seems like a no-brainer but people have been known to leave those out. If you find it hard to include those title keywords to help optimize your article, you may want to consider changing the name and title of your article.