Best Practices

7 SEO-informed steps for article writing

For example, from an SEO perspective, the following headline:

would be better as:

with the main keywords being "project restart" and "premier league"

This is a good example of a keyword rich headline with good potential for ranking well for a variety of searches.

Do not include a date or time in your article headline
Try to restrict the length of the headline to between 45-60 characters (including spaces and punctuation)
Should you need to exceed this length recommendation, consider where the text will be truncated in order to try and keep the most important part of the headline visible
This free tool will show how your headline (and the entire search result) will display in Google on both mobile and desktop
The better the article headline, the greater the chance that Google will display it as specified

The main point of the meta description for search is to convince people to click on the article – if it’s not compelling then people won’t click
It is good to include the main keyword in the meta description, but it is more important to make the description as interesting and relevant to what is on the page as possible
A good meta-description is between 115 and 155 characters
For news articles, it often works well to use the first 115-155 characters of the body copy

Before optimisation

After optimisation

Include at least 2 exact matches for the main keyword in the body text of the article
Use related keywords, such as singular/plural versions, variations by tense, or other semantically-related ideas, i.e. using the example of premier league as the main keyword, related keywords could include premier league pre-season, premier league clubs, premier league fixtures etc.
Google favours above-the-fold content, so be sure to use the main keyword and related keywords early, ideally in the first 100 words
Write content for readability and include the main keyword and related keywords in a natural way

Only link to the same page from the same page once (identical links are only counted once)
The text that links to a page is called anchor text. Avoid using generic terms like ‘see more’ or 'click here' as anchor text

To find other relevant articles and pages to link to, look through the article and identify internal linking opportunities
Look for semantically related themes (e.g. professional football returning, competitive football returns etc.)
Once you've identified internal linking opportunities, you may want to do a site search to see which pages within your site Google sees as most relevant
If there are no good opportunities to use anchor text, use Related: [article title] in a contextually relevant part of the article, preferably near the top

You could do the following site searches to identify relevant pages to link to:

site:eurosport.co.uk project restart

site:eurosport.co.uk premier league

By the same token, look for existing pages from which you can create an internal link to the new article.

Adding external links to very prominent and semantically relevant external websites can be very beneficial
Best practice is to link words as anchor text that we are not competing for with the external website

Post the link to your article on your official Facebook page, Twitter stream and any other relevant social channels
For articles with significant viral potential, it is a good idea to give an initial paid boost to maximise distribution

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