A lot of people who have an online business try to figure out how to write SEO articles, even though some say SEO is dead. The secret to writing for SEO is not to keyword stuff the crap out of your writing, but rather to write for your audience while sprinkling in your keyword phrase. You want to maintain a fairly low percentage of the occurrence of your keyword, include around 5 related keywords, and you need to know the right placement for these keywords.
There is no defined percentage for how frequently you can use your keywords in proper SEO content writing. The conventional wisdom is usually something like less than 4%. I think 4 or even 3% is rather high. Imagine in a 400 word article where you see the same phrase repeated 16 times. For most keyword phrases, this is going to look really unnatural, and whether or not you’re writing for SEO you should avoid such a high percentage of phrase usage. Generally I keep it to 1 percent and less, and for some keywords like “how to write SEO articles,” 1% might even seem a bit excessive.
You also want to include around 5 different variations of your phrase when writing SEO copy. This helps you target the long tails that others might not think of when they’re writing SEO articles. You can find these long tails by entering your phrase into the Google Keyword tool. You will also want to enter (in the keyword tool) shorter versions of your keyword phrase, and some variations that you can think of off the top of your head. This will help you get a wider range of keywords to use. Stick with phrases of 3 or more words, and at least 100 searches. This tactic is really effective for getting long tail traffic. I’m using it in this article – I’ve lost track of how many “how to write for seo” variations I’ve used at this point. Each phrase doesn’t contain the same words, but they all revolve around the basic concept of writing for SEO.
Finally, when you’re learning how to write SEO articles, it’s important to understand your main keyword’s position within the article. This is some really old school knowledge, but it’s generally important to have your main phrase in the first and last paragraph of your article, and at least once sometime in the middle. It’s even better if you can naturally squeeze it in the first and last sentence. While many things in SEO fluctuate, this one seems to be holding strong.
One final note about SEO writing: you always want to write for people first and the search engines second. The above tips will help you learn not only how to write SEO articles, but how to write them effectively and naturally and in a way that engages your reader, but includes proper SEO aspects.