Posted in Online Publishing Strategy	July 17, 2008

Use this list to optimize every new and old article or blog on your site in order to attract the most search engine traffic.

In the days of old, magazine editors had one primary responsibility: writing great content. Getting people to subscribe to, buy and read that content was someone else's job. In the online world, things are much different. If an editor wants their content to be found and read online, they must learn to partner with Google. They need to understand what people are searching for that is related to the content they offer, and must write and produce content specifically to those search terms. It's not easy, but it is necessary for online success.

Article landing pages with good conversion architecture see a 6-8% email newsletter conversion rate. If you want to see more sales or more page views, you must optimize your articles and blog posts for search engines.

We've told you plenty of times before that before you even start writing, you should already know your keywords. Using free keyword tools like Wordtracker and the Google Keyword Tool, you can determine the most popular keyword phrases people are using to find your main topics.

You should find at least two keyword phrases. After you find these keywords, you need to strategically spread them out across the article, both on the front end and on the back end.

Before you post next, make sure you've followed these eight rules for search engine optimizing an article:

SEO Writing Tip #1: Put primary keywords in the title. If your keyword is "organic gardening", then your article title should be something like "10 Organic Gardening Tips" or "How Organic Gardening Helped Me Lose 10 lbs".

SEO Writing Tip #2: Don't leave your meta title blank. In your blogging system, there should be a field for a meta title. This is the title that everyone sees when they find you on a search engine results page. This is also the field that tells the search engine what your primary keywords are.

SEO Writing Tip #3: Put secondary keywords in the subhead. Put your secondary keyword in your brief description of a subhead. You can also include the primary keyword for greater visibility in the search engine, as you should be using this subhead as your meta description too.

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SEO Writing Tip #4: Use your subhead as your meta description. Your meta description (also found in your blogging software) can easily be the same as your subhead. Since you've already optimized your subhead, this makes posting a meta description easy. Your meta description should ideally be optimized for under 70 characters (including spaces). You can make it longer, but incase it gets truncated, make sure your keywords are found at the beginning.

SEO Writing Tip #5: Include keywords in your URL. Both dashes and underscores are acceptable to Google now, so use either, but make sure that you are using your keyword in your URL. This should be easy if you've all ready used it in your article title. If your keyword is organic gardening, your URL might be http://www.site.com/10-organic-gardening-tips.com.

SEO Writing Tip #6: Optimize your tags and meta keywords. Most search engines use up to 18 of your meta keywords, so choose up to 18 meta keywords that you want to use for your article. Your meta keywords and tags should include your primary, secondary and any other keywords you included in your article.

SEO Writing Tip #7: Only use keywords 10% of the time. A keyword density of 10% is a good density to be in. Still, 8%-15% is a good range, but 10% may be the easiest to calculate on the go. The more content you have, the more times you can use your keyword, just don't overuse it. The quality of your content is always top priority.

SEO Writing Tip #8: Use titles or keywords in every hyperlink. If you are linking to another article, you should link to either the name of the article or your keywords. By omitting the words "click here", you are telling search engines that the link you are posting is related to the words you are linking. By saying "click here" you are telling search engines nothing about the link. By saying "good gardening" and linking to an article on gardening, you are telling search engines that your article has something to do with "good gardening".

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