Successful internet articles don’t need to be very long or sophisticated. Chose a topic you feel you can write about for a decent length, aim for 400-600 words structured into small paragraphs, then fire up your preferred word processor (Word, Open Office, Google Docs, etc) and start writing! The most important audience for your writing will be search engine bots but you should strive to write something meaningful and readable by real people as well. As you write, be sure to use key phrases that you want to rank for on Google. So for example, while writing about earl grey tea, I refer to it in a variety of ways — earl grey, earl grey tea, earl gray (a common misspelling) and so on.
If you’re having difficulty fulfilling the word count requirement, don’t throw in extra words. Use the last paragraph to summarize the article instead. This way you re-use important phrases rather than waste space with what I call ‘filler words’ that don’t increase the quality of your article.
There are a variety of tools available to measure the technical aspects of an article you’ve written. By measuring how often you use certain words and phrases, you can see which terms you overuse and which you should use more often. I’ll discuss these techniques towards the end of the guide in the ‘advanced’ area.
Before you continue to the next step, we quickly need to update your website’s ‘Permalinks’, or ‘urls’ to make them look nicer. Simply go to your WP-Admin page at yourdomain.com/wp-admin and then click ‘Settings’ on the left side, then click ‘Permalinks’ under the settings menu, and then set it up to look like this:
If you can’t see the picture well the text in the ‘Custom Structure’ field is “/%postname%” without the quotes. Just copy and paste it into your Custom Structure field on your Permalink settings page and click save changes. Don’t play with any other options on this page. Updating your ‘permalinks’ will change your URLs to something a lot cleaner and more optimized for search engines. After this you’re ready to move on!