Write SEO Friendly Articles: Updated Guide for 2020

What Makes an Article SEO Friendly

In the world of SEO, a large number of factors will end up influencing your results. The main goal is ranking higher. This can only be achieved by applying a large number of essential strategies. A fundamental strategy for dominating the rankings is creating quality content. However, the articles you write need to be SEO friendly if you want to maximize your efforts.

There’s a major difference between writing quality content for a printed format and writing content for the web. Although your overall message is the most important, web articles need to meet some technical requirements to rank as high as possible. We are going to highlight a few of these requirements in this article.

Keep in mind, before writing anything and applying these recommendations you need to consider your audience and perform proper research. For that, you can use paid keyword research tools or even free keyword research tools to generate some reliable results. That being said, make sure to consider the following fundamentals if you want to write SEO friendly articles.

One thing has changed since the first version of this guide: the fundamentals are no longer a nice extra, they are the entry ticket. Google’s own documentation is now built around helpful, people-first content, individual passages of a page can be surfaced on their own, and generative answer boxes quote pages that are clearly structured and easy to parse. Everything below serves both purposes at once: it helps a human read faster and it helps a machine understand what your page is about.

Start With Search Intent, Not With the Keyword

A perfectly optimised article that answers the wrong question will not rank. Before you open the editor, search your target keyword in an incognito window and look at what the first ten results actually are. Are they tutorials, comparison pages, product pages, or forum threads? That format is the format the search engine has already decided the query deserves. Match it, then improve on it.

Intent	Typical query shape	Format that wins	What to include
Informational	“what is”, “how to”, “why does”	Guide or tutorial	Definition, steps, screenshots, FAQ
Commercial	“best”, “vs”, “alternatives”, “review”	Comparison or roundup	Criteria, table, pros and cons, use cases
Transactional	“buy”, “price”, “agency”, “services”	Service or product page	Offer, scope, proof, clear next step
Navigational	brand or product name	Official page	Brand terms, contact details, sitelinks

Write down the intent at the top of your draft and keep it visible. Every heading you add afterwards should serve it. If a section does not help the reader complete the task behind the query, it belongs in a different article, and that different article becomes an internal linking opportunity later.

Post and Meta Title

There are two distinct titles that an article has. One is the post title seen by your readers when entering your article, and the other is the meta title seen by the search engine crawlers. It’s very helpful to use these two different type of titles as it gives you more freedom.

The Post title should be user-friendly so it conveys the idea of your article pretty easily. However, you can optimize the meta title as much as you want by including your main keyword in there. You can set up these two different titles by using a simple plugin like Yoast SEO. If you’re not specifying a meta title, the search engines will use your post title.

Moreover, make sure to include your keyword in the title as a general rule. If you can, place your keyword right at the beginning of the title as it will give you a higher boost. Aim for roughly 60 characters: Google truncates by pixel width rather than by character count, so a title full of wide capitals gets cut earlier than one in lower case. Remember that Google may also rewrite your title link when it decides your H1, your breadcrumb or your anchor text describes the page better, which is one more reason to keep all three consistent.

A title that survives rewriting usually follows a simple pattern: main keyword, then a qualifier that promises something specific, then the brand if there is room.

Weak draft	Problem	Stronger version
Our Thoughts On Writing	No keyword, no promise	How to Write SEO Friendly Articles: Checklist
SEO Article Writing Tips Tricks Guide Advice	Keyword stuffing, no reader benefit	SEO Article Writing: 10 Steps Before You Publish
Everything You Need To Know About Writing Content For Search Engines In The Modern Era	Truncated in the SERP	Writing Content for Search Engines: A Practical Guide

Meta Description

If you ever surfed the web then you’re most certainly familiar with meta descriptions. They are those descriptions situated under any web page ranked in Google. Sometimes they can be very helpful and other times they can be frustrating. However, from the perspective of a content creator, they are very important!

You should include a meta description for every page you create. Articles are considered by Google as pages so don’t skip them. Keep it around 155 characters, because anything longer is usually cut off, and mobile results are shorter still.

Include your main keyword in there and try to make everything sound as good as possible. This is going to be the first interaction a user will have with your article. The better you can sell your work, the more traffic you can gain. Not including a description, it’s a missed opportunity as Google will display a random part of your text.

Although it’s recommended to include these descriptions, they will not necessarily impact your rankings directly. However, such a description can guide users when searching online, increasing your chances of receiving a click. This can impact your rankings indirectly by communicating your authority and the value of your articles to search engines.

Be aware that Google frequently generates its own snippet when it believes a passage from your text answers the query better than your description. That is normal behaviour and not a penalty, and Google explains how snippets are chosen in its snippet documentation. Your job is to make sure that whichever version appears, it is still accurate. A workable description does four things:

• States what the page is, in the same words the reader searched for.
• Names the concrete deliverable: a checklist, a comparison, a template, a walkthrough.
• Adds one differentiator the competing snippets do not have.
• Ends with a light call to action instead of a truncated half-sentence.

Image Alt Text

Search engines have become far better at interpreting images than they used to be, but alt text remains the clearest and most reliable description you can give them, and it is the only one you fully control. It is also an accessibility requirement rather than an SEO nicety: screen readers announce it, and the W3C images tutorial explains how to choose the right text for decorative, informative and functional images.

This is the reason why using a generic and non-explicit name is a huge missed opportunity. Make sure to explain the image you’re uploading in a few direct keywords. Google will be able to consume the image easier and rank your article for relevant searches. Google’s image best practices are worth reading once and then applying on autopilot.

Adding an alt text it’s a straightforward process. You’ll have to only invest a few minutes for each article but the potential benefits are huge. In WordPress, you can easily add an alt attribute to your image when uploading it. It’s a manual process but it’s pretty fast.

While you are in the media library, spend the same two minutes on the rest of the image job:

• Rename the file before uploading: seo-friendly-article-checklist.jpg beats IMG_4471.jpg.
• Describe, don’t stuff. “Yoast SEO meta description field in the WordPress editor” is alt text; “seo article seo writing seo tips” is spam.
• Leave alt empty (alt=””) for purely decorative dividers so screen readers skip them.
• Serve modern formats such as WebP or AVIF and keep width and height attributes so the layout does not shift while the image loads.
• Lazy-load images below the fold, but never lazy-load the large image at the top of the article: that one is usually your Largest Contentful Paint element.

Crosslinking

Crosslinking between your blog’s posts it’s an underestimated technique that can bring you a considerable positive impact. The internet is just a cluster of outgoing and incoming links. Although getting links from other sites it’s more difficult, you can easily link between your own articles. You can check out our SEO Cross-Linking Tips to gain a better understanding of this.

However, when you write a new article, make sure to always include links to older posts. This can make users spend more time on your site by giving them other content recommendations. It’s a positive engagement signal that increases your overall page views.

However, make sure to specify an advantageous anchor text whenever including an internal link. The anchor text should always be the main ranking keyword of the article you’re linking to. Don’t overstress yourself when this is not possible and try to provide as much value as possible.

Here is a repeatable routine that takes about ten minutes per published article:

1. Search site:yourdomain.com “your new topic” in Google. The results are your existing pages that already discuss the subject.
2. Open the three or four most relevant of them and add one contextual link each, inside the body text, pointing to the new article.
3. From the new article, link out to two or three older posts that a reader would logically need next.
4. Vary the anchor text: use the target keyword once, then a partial match and a natural phrase. Twenty identical exact-match anchors look manufactured.
5. Never link two different articles with the same anchor text, or you are telling the crawler that both pages compete for the same term.
6. Re-run the same search every quarter. New posts create new linking opportunities for old ones.

Headings

This is one of the most fundamental technicalities that you must perfect if you want to write SEO friendly articles. The title of your post will automatically be H1 – you can’t and don’t want to change that. But, you can change the other headings of your article — Search Engine Journal explains how much the H1 tag actually matters for SEO.

The second highest one is H2. Although it might be more difficult in certain circumstances, always try to include your main keyword in an H2 tag. Include your keyword in as many tags as you feel comfortable with but try not to over-optimize your article as that might negatively impact your rankings.

Treat your headings as the outline a machine reads when it decides which passage of your page answers a specific question. Use one H1 only, keep H2 for the main sections, H3 for the sub-points inside them, and never skip a level just because a smaller font looks better. A clean outline for this very topic would look like this:

• H1: the article title, containing the main keyword.
• H2: one section per sub-topic, phrased the way people actually search (“Meta Description”, “Image Alt Text”).
• H3: the specific questions inside a section (“How long should a meta description be?”).
• Directly under each H2, a 40 to 55 word paragraph that answers the heading in plain language, before you elaborate. Those short answer blocks are what gets pulled into featured snippets and AI answers.

Technical Details That Still Move the Needle

Content wins the ranking, but technical hygiene decides whether the content ever gets a fair chance. Three things are worth checking on every article you publish.

Page experience and Core Web Vitals

The three current Core Web Vitals are LCP (loading), CLS (visual stability) and INP, which replaced First Input Delay in March 2024 and measures how quickly the page responds to every interaction, not just the first one. If you learned these metrics a few years ago, that swap is the one update you cannot skip; web.dev explains INP and how to diagnose it. In practice, for an article, most of the work is images, third-party scripts and heavy fonts.

Structured data

Marking up a post with Article structured data, including author and date, helps search engines connect the piece to the person and the site behind it. Most SEO plugins output it for you; validate the result with the Rich Results Test before assuming it works.

Measurement

Track outcomes in Google Analytics 4 and in Google Search Console, not in guesswork. Search Console tells you the queries and average position for the exact URL; GA4 tells you what people did afterwards. Two useful habits: check the “average position” of the article at 4 and 12 weeks, and note that a separate AMP version is no longer required for news visibility, so you can keep one fast, responsive template instead of maintaining two.

Worked Example: One Section, Before and After

Imagine you are writing about push notification opt-in rates. The first draft of a section reads: “Opt-ins. There are lots of things you can do here. We tried a few and some worked better than others, so think about your users.” It has no heading keyword, no structure, no answer.

The rewritten version keeps the same knowledge but gives it a shape a crawler can lift and a reader can act on. It opens with a heading that mirrors the query, answers that question outright in the first short paragraph, and only then expands. In full, the “after” reads:

How to Improve Push Notification Opt-In Rates
Opt-in rates improve when you stop asking at the wrong moment. Instead of firing the browser permission prompt the second someone lands on the page, wait until the visitor has shown intent, say in your own words what they will receive, and only then trigger the native dialog. A declined native prompt is difficult to reverse, so the order matters.

1. Delay the prompt until after a meaningful action, such as a second page view or a completed step.
2. Show your own soft pre-prompt first, so a refusal costs you nothing permanent.
3. Say what the notifications cover and roughly how often they arrive.

Add a screenshot with descriptive alt text and an internal link to the deeper article on the same subject, and the section is done. Same material as the draft above, but now the opening paragraph stands on its own as an answer and every element is doing a job.

Pre-Publish Checklist

Run this list before you hit publish. It takes fifteen minutes and it catches most of what costs rankings later.

1. Confirm the intent by re-checking the live results for your target query.
2. Main keyword appears in the H1, in at least one H2 and in the first 100 words, naturally.
3. Meta title under about 60 characters, keyword near the front.
4. Meta description around 155 characters with the keyword and a differentiator.
5. URL slug short, lower case, hyphenated, no dates or stop words.
6. Every image renamed, compressed, and given alt text.
7. Two to four internal links out, plus links added from older posts back in.
8. External links only to sources you would be happy to cite in a client report.
9. Heading outline logical, no skipped levels, no second H1.
10. Read it out loud once. If you stumble, the sentence is too long.

FAQ

How long should an SEO friendly article be?

There is no magic number, and length is not a ranking factor by itself. The practical rule is to cover the topic at least as completely as the pages currently ranking, then stop. If the top results answer the question in 800 words, a 3,000-word version padded with filler is more likely to bore readers than to outrank them.

What keyword density should I aim for?

None. Keyword density is a legacy metric. Use the main keyword where it matters structurally (title, one heading, opening paragraph, one internal anchor) and then write in the natural vocabulary of the topic, including synonyms and related entities. Modern search engines understand meaning, not repetition counts.

Should I update old articles or publish new ones?

Usually both, but updating first. A page that already has some history and internal links will normally respond faster to an update than a brand new URL will to a launch. Refresh the facts, rewrite the weak sections, add the missing subsections your competitors cover, and keep the same URL.

Can I use AI to write SEO friendly articles?

Google’s guidance judges the result, not the tool: content produced primarily to manipulate rankings is the problem, regardless of how it was produced. Use AI for outlines, first drafts and repetitive markup, then add the experience, examples and verification that only you can supply, and check every claim before it goes live.

How long until an article ranks?

It varies with competition and site authority, so treat any specific promise with suspicion. What you can control is the feedback loop: make sure the URL is indexed, then review Search Console impressions and average position after a few weeks and improve the page based on the queries it is already close to winning.

Conclusion

If you want to write SEO friendly articles this year, then you must take into consideration the elements mentioned above. Some of them might be pretty basic but still highly-important to understand and use. Titles, descriptions, alt text, internal links and a clean heading outline are still the foundation; search intent, page experience and honest structure are what turn that foundation into rankings. We keep this guide updated as search changes, so use it as a checklist rather than a one-off read, and your rankings might experience a considerable bump.