How to write a #1 ranking article in any niche.

17 replies
  • SEO
  • |
I see a lot of questions asked by people recently about how users can get to the front page of Google. Most people are focusing so much on the off-page factors: backlinks, social shares, and PBNs, that they overlook the most important factor in success with affiliate marketing: content.

People understand that content is king, but not everyone has a solid idea of how to strategize their content for maximum returns and rankings.

There isn't a magic formula that is guaranteed to work, but from working with large scale PBN owners for several years I have noticed some principles of success that can be applied to any niche.

Success Factor #1: 1,000 Words is the Minimum.

Anything less than 1,000 words per post is simply not going to have the meat behind it to ensure high rankings. If you don't have a 1,000-word post on the topic you want to rank for, then someone else will.

What piece of content do you think will be easier to rank? What post will offer more value to the visitor? There simply isn't words to make a 300, or even 500 words post authoritative.

Success Factor #2: Heading tags are critical.

Every post needs to have all of the correct headings of H1, H2, H3 in the right syntax and in descending quantities. Your H1 tag should be in the template of your site as the title. If your post is about 'The Benefits of Probiotics', then the H1 tag should be applied to this text.

The H1 tag is the most important attribute in on-page SEO. Some Wordpress templates do not specify this title tag, so it's important to check to see if it's being used or not. To see if your site is using the H1 tag. you can view the source code of your site and use Search and Replace function to search for '<h1>'.

If this tag is not being used, you can either add it into your Wordpress template via editing the template, or you can change to a theme that supports this. I cannot stress how important having an H1 tag is!

The other tags are H2 and H3. The H2 tag should be used once for the second most important heading in your content.

If you are writing a post about 'The Benefits of Probiotics' using the H1 tag, the second heading could be 'What are Probiotics?', or 'Why should I use Probiotics?'

The H2 tag is added in the Style section of most Wordpress editors. You should not use the H1 or H2 tag more than once.

From there you should be using the H3 and H4 tags for your other sections.

Your keyword needs to appear in at least one heading per post.

Success Factor 3: Keyword Density is not as important as LSI! LSI is King!

There's a lot of contention about what's the right keyword density. The truth is that as long it's around 3~5% you will be good. There is no sense in optimizing this metric as it actually has very little to do with your success or failure in the search engines.

The third most critical success factor is using LSI or https://www.searchenginejournal.com/...defined/21642/ as a guideline for writing your posts. In general, you should write content from the perspective of your visitor. How are they going to find your content? What terms are they going to search for?

Instead of having The Benefits of Probiotics as every title, what other terms are they going to search for? What are the synonyms are they going to use?

Probiotic pills

Probiotic supplements

Pills containing probiotics
etc

These synonyms and variations should be used liberally throughout the article, ensuring that you are covering the main keywords and each possible variation.

An article that has one keyword throughout the post is not going to rank well. Why? Because it is unnatural. A real post such as this one is not repeating the same keyword over and over; the article has a natural flow to it and provides real value.

You do need to strategize for the different synonyms and variations for LSI as a method for optimization, but if you do it for the sake of rankings then you are doomed to failure in the long-term.

On the other hand, if you focus on delivering unique value to your visitors, then you will have a much easier time, and you will build a real business.

Anyone who is struggling with ranking their sites will have much more success with following the above principles.

Providing 1,000 words of well-written content, using the right headers and optimizing for LSI will go a long way to securing victory on the search engines.
#article #niche #ranking #write
  • Profile picture of the author Regional Warrior
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  • Profile picture of the author customerblast
    I'm not so sure header tags are really weighed very heavily by Google these days, but aside from that some good points.
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  • Profile picture of the author Evan D
    Someone should email this post to Seth Godin so he can laugh at it.

    Terrible.
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  • Profile picture of the author Tiger Soul
    Banned
    Some of the points of view of this thread seems useful for me....

    got some new ideas from here....
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  • Profile picture of the author agmccall
    How about you write an article that people actually want to read, then they will share it. Following your advice you might have a decent showing in google but if the article reads like it was written for SEO purposes only then nobody will stay on your site.

    Another freelancer that wants to be a guru

    al
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  • Profile picture of the author WarriorWasim
    Good info. It's better to follow some top marketers who product quality contents that provide with great value and got huge social shares. If you take their article as a model and by testing and tracking it's possible to produce good articles.better than outsourcing if each gets enough time. Thanks :-)
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  • Profile picture of the author DABK
    If anything less than 1,000 words won't cut it, then 999 will not. And if 999 words won't cut it, you cannot be right. I'm just that partial to 999!

    Not to mention, I see tons of pages at #1 for one or another keyword with a wide variety of words below 1,000 and, at the same time, there are 1,000 and longer sitting on page 3 or 22 or 40.

    Originally Posted by Matthew North View Post

    I see a lot of questions asked by people recently about how users can get to the front page of Google. Most people are focusing so much on the off-page factors: backlinks, social shares, and PBNs, that they overlook the most important factor in success with affiliate marketing: content.

    People understand that content is king, but not everyone has a solid idea of how to strategize their content for maximum returns and rankings.

    There isn't a magic formula that is guaranteed to work, but from working with large scale PBN owners for several years I have noticed some principles of success that can be applied to any niche.

    Success Factor #1: 1,000 Words is the Minimum.

    Anything less than 1,000 words per post is simply not going to have the meat behind it to ensure high rankings. If you don't have a 1,000-word post on the topic you want to rank for, then someone else will.

    What piece of content do you think will be easier to rank? What post will offer more value to the visitor? There simply isn't words to make a 300, or even 500 words post authoritative.

    Success Factor #2: Heading tags are critical.

    Every post needs to have all of the correct headings of H1, H2, H3 in the right syntax and in descending quantities. Your H1 tag should be in the template of your site as the title. If your post is about 'The Benefits of Probiotics', then the H1 tag should be applied to this text.

    The H1 tag is the most important attribute in on-page SEO. Some Wordpress templates do not specify this title tag, so it's important to check to see if it's being used or not. To see if your site is using the H1 tag. you can view the source code of your site and use Search and Replace function to search for '<h1>'.

    If this tag is not being used, you can either add it into your Wordpress template via editing the template, or you can change to a theme that supports this. I cannot stress how important having an H1 tag is!

    The other tags are H2 and H3. The H2 tag should be used once for the second most important heading in your content.

    If you are writing a post about 'The Benefits of Probiotics' using the H1 tag, the second heading could be 'What are Probiotics?', or 'Why should I use Probiotics?'

    The H2 tag is added in the Style section of most Wordpress editors. You should not use the H1 or H2 tag more than once.

    From there you should be using the H3 and H4 tags for your other sections.

    Your keyword needs to appear in at least one heading per post.

    Success Factor 3: Keyword Density is not as important as LSI! LSI is King!

    There's a lot of contention about what's the right keyword density. The truth is that as long it's around 3~5% you will be good. There is no sense in optimizing this metric as it actually has very little to do with your success or failure in the search engines.

    The third most critical success factor is using LSI or https://www.searchenginejournal.com/...defined/21642/ as a guideline for writing your posts. In general, you should write content from the perspective of your visitor. How are they going to find your content? What terms are they going to search for?

    Instead of having The Benefits of Probiotics as every title, what other terms are they going to search for? What are the synonyms are they going to use?

    Probiotic pills

    Probiotic supplements

    Pills containing probiotics
    etc

    These synonyms and variations should be used liberally throughout the article, ensuring that you are covering the main keywords and each possible variation.

    An article that has one keyword throughout the post is not going to rank well. Why? Because it is unnatural. A real post such as this one is not repeating the same keyword over and over; the article has a natural flow to it and provides real value.

    You do need to strategize for the different synonyms and variations for LSI as a method for optimization, but if you do it for the sake of rankings then you are doomed to failure in the long-term.

    On the other hand, if you focus on delivering unique value to your visitors, then you will have a much easier time, and you will build a real business.

    Anyone who is struggling with ranking their sites will have much more success with following the above principles.

    Providing 1,000 words of well-written content, using the right headers and optimizing for LSI will go a long way to securing victory on the search engines.
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  • Profile picture of the author AMarketingKing
    I agree on the LSI part, not sure you need 1000 words minimum though. I have had posts that ranked #1 on google, and it had like 750 words.
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    • Profile picture of the author hrishivardhan
      Originally Posted by AMarketingKing View Post

      I agree on the LSI part, not sure you need 1000 words minimum though. I have had posts that ranked #1 on google, and it had like 750 words.
      I agree on the both of your points. length is only matter when you wants to target multiple keywords.


      I really appreciates your efforts for making this article ranking checklist. it really will be good help for many.
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  • I dont know, I dont agree with most of these points, specially the one regarding the 1000 words thing, what evidence are you using to claim that?.

    You say content is the king, however I think writing articles that long actually kills the king, who is going to read such a long article these days?

    Ive seen web with an amazing ranking in google, with very small articles on their blogs, I really dont think there is any piece of evidence that backs what you are saying
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  • Profile picture of the author netbull
    1. Carefully choose the keywords you need your article to rank highest for. If being number 1 for a certain phrase is important for you, choose keywords that aren't very competitive. Concurrently, you desire to make sure that it's a phrase individuals will actually seek out, and this individuals who search for that phrase have an interest in what you have to sell. Wordtracker.com delivers a good free tutorial concerning how to choose good keywords for your personal website. The same techniques affect your articles.

    2. Put your keyword phrase near the start of the title of your article. It might take some word smiting so it will be seem like it belongs there.

    3. Your keyword phrase ought to be near the start of the first sentence of your respective article and sprinkled through the article body. Be sure you write naturally which means that your keyword phrase doesn't get noticed and detract from the readability of the article.

    4. Use subheadings with your article. Place your keyword phrase in one or two of your subheadings you employ during the entire article.
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  • Profile picture of the author Mike Anthony
    Success Factor #1: 1,000 Words is the Minimum.

    Anything less than 1,000 words per post is simply not going to have the meat behind it to ensure high rankings. If you don't have a 1,000-word post on the topic you want to rank for, then someone else will.
    Did you even bother to check google before writing that? Takes 10 minutes of doing searches and seeing the top ranked sites to know thats nonsense.
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  • Profile picture of the author Matthew North
    I can only speak from experience in highly competitive niches (supplements, cosmetics, garcinia etc)

    If you look at these reviews, ALL of the top performing sites are using 1,000+ articles, and the majority are being powered via a PBN.

    It's not that it's required from a strictly SEO standpoint, but as a matter of strategy and game theory. If every other site is using 1,000 words, why penalize yourself with using anything less than what your competitors are using?

    Above that, you’ll probably rank for multiple long tail variants of the keyword you optimized your text for. In a lengthy text, you probably address multiple topics. Your article will have a chance to turn up in search results for all these long tail variants. Combined this will result in a growth of the organic traffic to your site.

    These are facts that you can't dispute LOL. Anyone saying otherwise isn't thinking about this clearly. A longer article will perform better in general than a shorter one.

    Same thing could be said about PBNs; they aren't strictly necessary to rank a site, but if you want to be competitive you need to be getting the same advantages that everyone else is using.
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  • Profile picture of the author KylieSweet
    There is no exact words limit to rank your article and its either less than 1000 or more than 1000 depends on the style of delivery in which is new and interesting. It depends on how well your content engage to the users and been shared to their networks.
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  • Profile picture of the author Joshua Dunson
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  • Profile picture of the author Zohaib Jahan
    I wana endorse your points by saying "Eye Catching Headline increases CTR and Comprehensive article will take you at #1".
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  • Profile picture of the author K Edward
    I agree with most of the points too, except the 1000-word bit. Most of the high-ranking pieces range between 500 to 750 words. Over 88% of visitors on most of the blogs are what I like to call grazers; for this group, they would rather read a 300-words compressed summary than a whole 1000-word piece.

    To put this in perspective, of the 314 members that have visited this thread as at now, I can confidently estimate that less than 50 have read through the post word by word. That means about 84% of visitors haven't fully engaged with your post. How many words is this post again?

    You got the point right?

    Oh, and assume you understand how "time spent" on your page and "bounce rate" affects ranking. Good. Now connect the dots back to my estimates above.

    I support your thoughts on the LSI and tags though.
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    • Profile picture of the author Matthew North
      Originally Posted by K Edward View Post

      I agree with most of the points too, except the 1000-word bit. Most of the high-ranking pieces range between 500 to 750 words. Over 88% of visitors on most of the blogs are what I like to call grazers; for this group, they would rather read a 300-words compressed summary than a whole 1000-word piece.

      To put this in perspective, of the 314 members that have visited this thread as at now, I can confidently estimate that less than 50 have read through the post word by word. That means about 84% of visitors haven't fully engaged with your post. How many words is this post again?

      You got the point right?

      Oh, and assume you understand how "time spent" on your page and "bounce rate" affects ranking. Good. Now connect the dots back to my estimates above.

      I support your thoughts on the LSI and tags though.
      That's an interesting theory.

      If you were to look at any of our posts you would see that they were written to be skimmed, not consumed sentence by sentence.

      Of course if users see a massive block of text 4-5 sentences long per paragraph then people are going to reflexively hit the back button, which is why you break up the content with headings, lists, and different styles to keep the visitor's attention on the page.

      I agree that people want condensed information, but the trouble is getting people to actually find your content in the first place.

      Something important to understand is that the word count isn't a magic number I came up with in my mother's basement. We've tested numerous iterations of word counts for articles in the most competitive niches of internet marketing, and 1,000 words consistently outperformed the thinner articles.

      I have real data I could show people for the differences in rankings and sales as a result of writing longer articles. Why don't you actually test it instead of criticizing the advice?
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  • Profile picture of the author Zarine Khan
    Hello Dear,

    Get increase for your Article traffic follow below step:

    - Right Unique and Fresh Article around 700 to 1000 words.
    - Proper Define Title Around 50-60 Words Title.
    - Use Unique Fresh Description for 150-200 Words.
    - This Information very useful for increase web traffic.

    Thanks.
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