We at SportsPassion.net are excited about our fast growing and high impact sports site. Luckily, we have a growing pool of contributing writers who are constantly current and offering relevant sports stories.
In an effort to keep eyes glued to the site, and attract others, we offer these guidelines for submissions. As we grow, our advertising base gets more critical and we want to consistently deliver quality sports pieces while inviting great exposure for our writers.
Benefits of SEO:
Quality SEO means more exposure for both the author and SportsPassion.com. Search Engine Optimization means higher Google ranking, the goal of any commercial website. There are plenty of in depth explanations of SEO available on the web. Anyone writing online needs familiarity with SEO in order for the site and the article to succeed.
The Basics:
Key Words – If Serena Williams just wins the French Open, then chances are your key words are Serena Williams and French Open. For a 500 word piece, you likely need 1% keyword density or 5 mentions.
- Title: Serena Williams Reigns Supreme in French Open
- First Sentence: Once again, Serena Williams takes the title in this year’s French Open.
- Sprinkle the Key Words 3 times throughout the piece
- Last Sentence: With Serena Williams retaking the French Open crown, we can do nothing but look forward to her U.S. Open appearance.
Google has armies of algorithms looking for these topical words. By implementing them in the order described above, you are better insuring your article and thus the site is found and hopefully read.
For sports writers, having a sense of SEO and proper keyword usage is huge.
Break It UP!
Writing for the web is not a term paper. It is not a newspaper article and certainly not a book. People buy reading materials to read. They SKIM websites. If you don’t make your point in 3 seconds, with 3 lines of text, say goodbye to the reader. One look at a page determines if a reader will stay.
Big blocks of text heavy content chase readers away. Simply, paragraphs suck! Do not write them as you were taught in school. They must be 5 sentences MAX and be sprinkled with short sentences featuring some BOLD type.
At times you will bold the key words, but the goal is to get the reader to the end of the sentence, the end of the paragraph, and the end of the article which hopefully contains a call to further action. This could be anything from “buy now” to “check out other Serena articles here” or “read more by this writer here”.
By breaking up the text with short sentences, small paragraphs and some bold type, we are guiding the reader along. Use of bullet points, lists or numbers is also crucial. Anything to keep a reader reading is what gets the gold. Keep it simple, keep it short and you’ll ktion. eep the reader.
Time for a New Heading
See what I did there? Time to change subjects at least a bit. The thinking is, we are writing to an 8th grade education. Not an insult, just fact. Even the smartest readers are pressed for time and bombarded by information choices. By moving on, we are keeping the flow and thus given an opportunity to give more information and keep the reader on our article and our site.
Links
Anyone on an interactive page, knows the value of links or hyperlinks that can take you directly to a source of primary or further information. Many word processing programs have built in tools allowing easy link development.
Linking is a reciprocal effect that Google praises and encourages when done correctly. It is meant to add relevance and quality to both pages or sites and can help to increase google ranking.
Be careful, Google frowns upon black hat techniques meant just for building up page hits. For example, if you link your Serena Williams article to a business site selling gourmet coffee, it is obviously not relevant and seen as an underhanded technique looking to build hit counts. Google will punish this practice by lowering ranking into obscurity.
To sum up, by keeping sentences short, breaking up text into smaller, interesting chunks using lists, boldface, bullets and other text features, you are leading your reader down the page. Use keywords and links to fortify your message and increase readership and ranking.
By looking at established sports and other sites, see who the biggest writers are and how their messages are being laid out and read. This all helps you as the writer and of course all of us here at www.sportspassion.net.
