How I Write SEO Optimize Article in 45 Minutes or Less

Sometimes, you just don’t have time to spend writing articles for your blog. It could be because you’re busy doing other works or maybe you just want to have more time having fun with your friends. As a part-time blogger myself, I could understand the need to finish writing a blog post fast. But there is one challenge that blog writing presents that more traditional writing mediums don’t. You not only have to create a compelling article with a catchy headline, your article or blog post also need to be optimized for the search engines. It has been proven over and over again that the search engines (Google, MSN, and Yahoo) are still one of the biggest traffic sources. So, if you don’t optimize your article for these three giants, you might end up popping up on page 10 of the search engines, i.e. nobody would find your site. These are the steps that I take to write a SEO optimize article in 45 minutes or less.

Step 1: Generate Ideas for Contents and Headlines

(the night before – not counted in the 45 minutes)

This is the time when you could freely explore ideas related to your blog’s main topic. You could grab ideas from something that happen to you recently and connect it to blogging, like the recent Blogussion post, 6 Blogging Lessons I Learned from Walking on Crutches. You could promote affiliate products while talking about your experience with it, like what News Notion do with its recent Netbook post. Or you could simply write a cool post that have no intention of selling anything, like me ^-^. Whatever your idea is, just keep putting it on paper. It could be about PPC, SEO, blogging, personal development, whatever.

After you have some more general ideas of what you want to write, delve deeper into it. So, if you have an idea of writing about SEO (search engine optimization), what part of SEO would you write about? SEO Optimize article? Creating SEO-friendly blogs? Or maybe, back linking strategies for SEO? Just dig deeper into your original (more general) ideas until you have no more. You could use Google Wonder Wheel tool to helps you. [Learn more: Top 6 Essential Free Blogs Research Sites]. Also, do some research online and take notes of the topic that you might be writing about the next day.

Step 2: Do Keyword Research

(10 minutes – give or take)

Brian Clark, from the famous CopyBlogger blog, once said that only 20 % of the visitors or readers would continue reading after the headlines. To increase the odds of of people continue reading your article, you have to create a compelling headline. So, start by writing the title of your article. Make a big promise and interesting remarks that spark the readers’ interest. After that, find good keywords(meaning: little amount of competition with decent searches per month) that could be combined with your headline.

Go to Google Keyword Tool and put in the possible keywords you have gathered yesterday into this free but powerful keyword generator tool. Make sure you ticked Use Synonyms, so that Google generate related search terms from your base keywords. Grab a couple of keywords that you think might fit in your headline and test it in the Google search engine with “quotes” to check the number of competing pages. As I’ve said in my previous article, choose keywords with less than 7,000 competing pages but have at least 1,000 searches/month. Keep repeating this step until you find the one that meets this criteria. You could do this step with other keyword tools as well, like Traffic Travis (free) or Keyword Elite 2.0. Depending on the amount of time I have, I might use all three of them to compare data. But if I’m short in time, I would just stick with Google Keyword Tool. [Learn more: 5 Perpetual Laws of Search Engine Keyword Research].

Step 3: Write and Publish Your Article

(25 minutes)

Now that you find your keywords, it’s time for some writing action. Using the notes that you have taken from the research you did the previous night, you could start writing your own SEO optimize article. Incorporate the keywords you have chosen into your headline. Also remember to scatter your keywords in the body of your articles. Don’t overdo it. You’re writing for your readers, not the search engine bots. When you finish writing your article, publish it. If you’re using WordPress, you could use All-In-One-SEO plug-in to help you further optimized the meta description and tags of your post. [Learn More: 16 Ridiculously Useful WordPress Plugins]

Step 4: Check for Optimization

(10 minutes)

After you publish your article, you need to check how optimized it is. I’m using Traffic Travis Pro to check how optimized my particular page or post is for the keywords I’m targeting. You could download the free version here. Open Traffic Travis and go to Page Analysis tab on the left hand side of the screen. Enter the URL of your post and the keywords you are targeting into the table inside the Page Analysis tab. Click Analyze Page(s). Traffic Travis would take a couple of seconds to analyze your post and generate a score. Click on the Report Summary tab to see more details. You could use the information here to tweak your page until you’re happy with the score. Try to aim for an A, if possible. But again, don’t overdo it. If your article starting to sounds unnatural, STOP.

Step 5: Seed Your Article

(15 minutes – not counted in the 45 minutes)

This is a crucial but optional step. If you have done all the steps mentioned above, your article should already be fully optimized for SEO. This is just to increase your chance to rank higher in the search engine by building back links. The word seeding is used by Darren Rowse, from ProBlogger, to describe the ways to market your article without being forceful. Don’t put too little effort into this step or you won’t see the result. And don’t be too aggressive or it might hurt your blog. The art is in finding the balance. Tweet about your article and ask your friends to tweet about it as well. Social bookmark your articles using sites like Digg, Stumble Upon, etc. Change your signature in forums to your latest blog post and start posting a couple of replies. Post comments on blogs that allow you to have your latest post listed together with your comments. Just do these simple and easy steps every time you finish a post. [Learn More: 7 Incredibly Easy & Effective Link Building Tactics]

I have revealed the steps I took to write a SEO Optimize article in 45 minutes, now it’s your turn to take action and start implementing the steps above whenever writing your blog posts. Feel free to leave comments below or tweet it if you like it.

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