How to Write Panda-Friendly Articles
Writing Panda-Friendly articles is the foundation of any modern day SEO campaign. Googlebot armed with the new Panda algorithms, is scouring the internet looking for poorly written content and punishing anyone that doesn’t comply. This is why changing up your article writing style may be one of the most valuable Post-Panda SEO tips I have to offer.
1. Small Informational Bites
Keep the paragraphs short; Between 3 to 6 sentences long and separate them with headers. Online writing is different than normal print publications in the sense that the average online reader is less engaged and therefore, wants to read small bites of information. Rather than having large blocks of text that might make a reader click away, keep your paragraphs short and packed full of information. No fluff!
2. Semantic Keyword Density
2% keyword density is too much in the Post-Panda era as a 1000 word article would have to mention the keyword at least 20 times and this totally looks spammy. Instead, use keyword synonyms or semantically related keywords because Google now loves synonyms. An example could be replica watches, imitation watches, counterfeit watches or fake Rolexes. Using this strategy you can really get your keyword density up to 3% or even 4% without raising red flags with Google’s webspam team. I also suggest reading my more in-depth article titled, Kewyord Research Expert.
3. Create Bulleted or Numbered Lists
Readers like to see bulleted and numbered list because it helps them to find useful information when skimming or scanning your article. In addition, search engines read the HTML attributes that create these list and give more weight to the article. You can put the whole article into a numbered format as I have done here or just create a number or bullet list summarizing, outlining or indexing the subject matter.
4. Use More Than Just Text
Other forms of online content increase the quality of your SEO-friendly articles. Include high quality images, polls, relevant videos, quizzes, graphs, tables, charts or flash. A great example of this would be Squidoo or Hubpages; These guys won’t even publish your article unless they include a few of these bells and whistles.
5. Panda Approved Article Length
Some topics require more words than others however, longer is almost always better so try to aim for a minimum of 750 words. While this article may only be around 750 words it is packed with information, reads as a step-by-step guide and fully covers the topic. If I was writing about nuclear fusion, I would expect to write a couple of thousand words to accurately discuss the topic.
6. Give Outbound Links
This sounds crazy right?!? Why in the world would you want to give away links and loose your link juice? I can and will write a full article about this post Panda tip but in this article, I will just summarize. Google likes to crawl as much as possible and if you can provide a relevant link to a helpful resource and the user clicks-through and sticks, then Google will reward you for it. The rules are simple, do not link to any page or site that competes for the same type of traffic. Link only to high authority sites like .edu, .gov or any high PR site. For an example just look at my outbound links here or in this post Post-panda Article Marketing Tips.
7. If Outsourcing Your SEO Articles
Outsourcing your article writing is not really something I suggest because from what I have seen, no company out there understands the Panda-friendly article guidelines or if they do understand them they don’t want to follow them. That being said, if you will be outsourcing your SEO articles to other countries like India, Philippines and Romania make sure the copywriters write English like Americans write it. Common mistakes are punctuation, incorrect singulars and plurals, future, past and present tenses and poor sentence construction. Even little things like, “I am interested to cars” when a true English speaking person would say, “I am interested in cars”. If an 8 year old child can tell the difference, then you better believe a multibillion dollar company like Google can tell the difference too.
8. Create User Activity
Get the reader to engage by asking questions or evoking them to comment below. Google loves to see user generated content and user activity. The best way to give an example of this is by asking you a few questions here…
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Please let me know in the comments below.
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Category: Post Panda SEO
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