Recall that there are two steps to writing an article that can rank on the front page of Google:
1. Write the best article on the internet.
2. Optimize the article using technical SEO.
This tutorial will cover the second point in detail.
How to Optimize Your Article Using Technical SEO
When you write the best article on the internet about a specific keyword, you can think of this as creating a golden egg for Google to present to readers searching for that keyword.
However, to increase the chances that Google actually finds your golden egg you need to make sure your article is optimized for that keyword. You can do so by using technical SEO, which involves the following steps:
Step 1: Make sure your article title includes the keyword and does not exceed 70 characters.
First, you need to make the keyword that you’re targeting is in the title of your article. For example, consider the article that I wrote for Statology targeting the keyword “real life examples of ANOVA.”
I decided to make the title: 4 Examples of Using ANOVA in Real Life
This title includes the keyword I am targeting. It doesn’t have to match the exact order of the phrase “real life examples of ANOVA” but it does need to include each of the words in the phrase. Google is smart enough to pick up on titles that have approximate matches.
Also, Google only displays the first 70 characters of a title including your website name. This means you should make sure your article title (including the website name) doesn’t exceed 70 characters or else it will get cut off in the search results.
Note: Spaces count as characters in a title.
Step 2: Make sure your keyword is in the slug of the URL.
The slug of a URL is the part that comes after the domain name. For example, consider the URL:
www.statology.org/anova-real-life-examples/
The slug is anova-real-life-examples. This includes the keyword that I’m targeting and it excludes any unrelated keywords like “of” “and” “the” “for” – it’s important that you only include the keyword you’re targeting. As a rule of thumb, the shorter the slug the better.
Step 3: Make sure your keyword is in the meta description.
The meta description of an article is the snippet that shows up below each search result. It provides a brief description of what your article is about. It’s important that you include your keyword in the meta description.
For example, the meta description of this article is “ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) explained in simple terms. How it compares…”
If you don’t provide a meta description, Google will attempt to make one for you using text from your article, but it’s best to actually write the meta description yourself so you can control exactly what appears in the search results.
You can modify the title, slug, and meta description of your article using the free Yoast SEO WordPress plugin that I recommended earlier. Once this plugin is installed, it will provide an area at the bottom of each article in WordPress where you can modify the title, slug, and meta description.
Here’s what that looks like for the “real life examples of ANOVA” article:
Notice that the Yoast SEO plugin provides two color scales to indicate whether or not my title exceeds 70 characters and whether or not all of my meta description will fit in the search results. As long as neither of these color scales is red, I’m good to go.
Step 4: Add Alt text to images.
The phrase “alt text” is short for “alternative text” which is simply a short phrase that is used to describe an image within an article.
You can add alt text to any image in WordPress by simply clicking on the image within the editor, then clicking Edit. You can then type whatever you’d like in the Alternative Text box.
The following screen pops up where you can write a brief description of the image. For example, I used the description “F distribution table for alpha = 0.1” to describe the image shown below:
The greatest benefit of using alt tags for your images is the fact that they allow your images to appear in image search results on Google. For example, if you search for “F distribution table” in Google you’ll find that the image above shows up as the top result under Images:
As a rule of thumb, your alt text should be descriptive but not excessively so. For example, the following alt text would not have been descriptive enough:
- “f table”
But the following alt text would have been excessive:
- “f distribution table with blue and white alternating rows and a header for both the column and the row for the table”
Instead, I used alt text that was descriptive but not excessive:
- “F distribution table for alpha = 0.1”
Keep this in mind when creating alt tags for your own images.
Step 5: Use relevant internal links when possible.
An internal link is a link within your article that points to another article on your site.
For example, if I’m writing an article about “An Introduction to Quadratic Regression” I might link to the following articles on my site:
- How to perform quadratic regression in Excel
- How to perform quadratic regression in R
- An online quadratic regression calculator
Whenever possible, add relevant internal links to improve the overall SEO of your site and to increase the chances that a reader clicks to another article on your site.
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