Making your sports articles SEO friendly

Writing sports articles encompass the art of captivating linguistic and rhetorical skills alongside facts and statistics, names, and team affiliations. Search engine optimization is a component adherent to generating online traffic to a certain article, website, posting, or other piece of writing. Obviously you don’t want to take away from the content of the article nor the tone. In fact, writing an SEO piece allows you the same theme, tone, and purpose only altering the verbiage a bit.

The first step is to think of a short list of the top two or three words which best describe the topic of your article. Should the article be about a specific football team, you will want to generate a list which incorporates the team or sport and adjectives that best describe said sport. Common words that people would use when searching for content related to your website or the article within your website are the best words to use. Your goal is to generate as much traffic and search engine results based on the top handful of words matching against your article.

The words that you select should then be organized into a key word or phrase. This phrase will generally be the title of your sports article. The key phrase should show up within the first sentence of the article. Ensuring that the article is no less than 300 words and generally no more than 500, your goal is to divide the article into six or seven paragraphs, all short and each containing the keyword or phrase. If your keywords are “placing successful bets” you want to make sure that the SEO content remains that original phrase. It cannot be a variation of the phrase, which will require that some sentences be carefully reconstructed to adhere to the tense of the paragraph while being grammatically correct in its inclusion of the SEO key phrase. When it is completed, proofreading is the next step. Proofread the article like any other and check for spelling, grammar, transitions from one paragraph to the next, and then look for the SEO content and that it reads well. Practice and patience will in fact make perfect as the adage goes. It might seem too technical and forced at first, but maintaining the integrity of your pieces to include SEO key phrases and words will increase the traffic to your site, blog, etc…

After the SEO keywords and phrases have been selected and you have finished and proofread the article, the next step is outside factors. These factors include linking yourself in online directories. Look for directories which relate to the content of your website. The Open Directory Project is the largest directory in the world as far as websites are concerned. Volunteers maintain the site and will review your website before listing it in the directory.

However, once listed, sites such as Google and America Online, and Hotmail will search for directories first. It will take a few weeks before your website is listed, but once listed the traffic to your page and rankings in Google will increase and being listed is free. Yahoo does not allow free commercial sites to be listed, but the fee is just under three hundred dollars per year to maintain a listing in Yahoo’s directory. Once you are linked to one or more of these directories, you can submit articles in your area of expertise or passion through their sites. This will not only continue to generate more traffic to your website or personal blog, but will provide you the opportunity to get your name published on the World Wide Web.