Writing articles is tough, and writing a perfectly optimised article is even tougher. But it’s not impossible. Stay with me till the end of this article and you will get some idea about writing a perfectly optimised article. Because in this post, we are going to talk about just that.
So, what is a perfectly optimised article? How does it look like?
Now, everyone has a different definition of perfectly optimised articles, for few, it’s about writing an error-free article, you know, the articles without any grammatical errors and typos. Yes, that.
But let me tell you, it’s not just about writing grammatical error free articles.
You may write an error free article, but that too might be far, far away from being an optimised article if it does not solve the problem why the article was written in the first place.
If the reader isn’t satisfied with the article and turns back to look for some other article on the same topic, then your article has failed its purpose of existence. Below, we will talk about several ways you can make your article perfectly written.
A perfectly optimised article is written for Humans and not for search engines, it is not a keyword stuffed article that is created for the sole purpose ranking. Google search has evolved so much that it almost thinks like a human, and if the article can impress a human being, it will impress the search engines.
And this is what we are going to talk about today, writing articles that will impress humans, by being useful.
Use the first Paragraph to describe your article
You may have learned in school how to structure an article. We will follow the basics. The first paragraph is used for telling what the article is actually about. This is important, especially for writing on the web.
The attention span of a visitor is less, most readers would just read the first paragraph and decide whether they want to continue reading or not.
The first paragraph is your chance to tell the visitor what your article is all about. You can start getting into details of the post from the second paragraph.
Break your article in sections
No one wants to read a big chunk of text on a page, okay, a few people would still read it, but we don’t want a few people to read our article, we want a lot of them.
We need to help them by breaking our article in small sections, it’s very helpful for the visitors who like to skim the article, this helps them quickly jump to the section they feel would be interesting or useful to them.
For example, if you are reviewing a product, you can break it into sections like It’s usage, specifications, how to operate it, whats your thought on the product etc. I hope you get the point.
Don’t get into Too Much Detail
If you think you are elaborating or describing a small section of the article a little too much, it would be better to write a separate article on that and link it back to the article. Your focus should be to keep all the sections look equal in length.
All the sections don’t necessarily have to be equal, but when you feel like you need to break a section into smaller sections, and there is more you can write about that topic, it should be a separate article.
I usually keep the length of my articles less than 1000-1200 words, if it goes beyond that, I create a separate article, this is cool because you also get ideas for new articles.
Use Proper Text Formatting
Using proper text formatting to put emphasis on the words is important. And it’s not just about using H3 tags for sub-headings, you should also make use of Bold, Italic, Highlighter and numbers.
You can choose to use it whatever way you want but the point is, be consistent throughout the article, If you Bold the Product name, a place or a thing, do that throughout the article wherever it is mentioned.
Or, you can Bold a sentence or Highlight it to put emphasis on it. Italics can be used for Quotes or statements made by someone, or uses of non-English words in the article.
You can number the sections, using 1, 2, 3. And if those sections require you to mention a list, you can use alphabets like a, b, c. This makes the article easily digestible.
Use Images, Quotes and Videos Effectively
Too much text on a page can look boring, the text formatting can help make it look nice but adding visuals to it can make the articles standout.
A great picture is worth thousand words, so is a beautiful quote. You will find quotes on almost any topic, just search them and add them to your article, it makes a huge difference.
A great picture is worth thousand words, & so is a beautiful quote.
We can say the same thing for Videos as well, In fact, YouTube is becoming one of the largest platforms for visual information, you can easily find and embed relevant videos to your posts. You can also create your own videos to add them to your article.
Not only you will have a visual content to compliment your article, you will also use YouTube to drive traffic back to your blog by leaving the article link in the description of the video on YouTube.
Related Reading: Getting Started with YouTube Production
Add a Clear Call to Action (CTA) at the End of the Article
This is the mistake I have seen a lot of bloggers making, they do not add any call to action to their articles. They believe that if their article is not about selling something, there is no affiliate product they talked about in the article, there is no need of a CTA.
But the CTA doesn’t have to be sales pitch all the time, it can also be about Signing up for the newsletter to keep getting useful articles in their emails. A CTA is also about encouraging your readers to share their thoughts on the topic in the comment section or leave a link for them to read another related article they might find useful.
For example, you might be interested in knowing how you can save your time in proofreading by using Grammarly, that find more Grammatical errors and typos than any other tool. Go Check out the article⟶
