Easiest Way To Understand SEO For Optimizing Articles To Get 100s, Even 1000s Of Reads

Why do I think this matters? Because every view of an article is a potential read of an article. With every read of an article, there are rewards. To get the financial reward you have to get views, which means more opportunities to get reads. If I can go from 500 or fewer views to near viral or viral status, anyone can do the same thing.

I experimented with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) until I found easy-to-understand steps that I have incorporated and raised my views on articles. I’ve gone from my most viewed article having 500 to having multiple articles with 5,000 plus and my best having over 7300. I feel confident after doing this ten times and seeing the results, the method and thoughts I've used are proven enough to share with others.

A Proven Method

I know people hate these articles. But there are people out there that question writing on these platforms, whether they can be successful and whether they can make money writing on these platforms. That and the fact that they’re highly read articles is what makes them so popular.

I took this advice when it was offered to me. I used it in December and more than doubled my writing income. In January I used it and more than doubled it again. When I originally wrote this piece I had two viral stories with several more headed that way. I’m now sitting at 10. Last month I was at 300.00 in income for writing on Medium.

What’s SEO

SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization and it is the practice of applying practices to improve or optimize online content to rank/perform well on different search engines.

In the particular article that I’m using as an example, in the URL the words NASA, NEURUS, Earths, and Orbit are the keywords.

You have to place primary keywords in:

URL (https://medium.com/writers-blokke/nasa-report-nereus-will-break-into-earths-orbit-in-days-62693224e7af). Putting keywords into the URL helps to make the content you’ve created more likely to be found on search engines such as GOOGLE and achieve a higher ranking.

First words of the page (TITLE). In this case, the title of the article was NASA Reports Nereus Will Break Into Earth’s Orbit In Days

Meta description (summary). This is readable, plain language, and it encourages or inspires people to click on the link from Bing, Google, Yahoo, etc. On Medium, go to your article, find the three dots at the bottom, click, then scroll to story settings, click again, and scroll down to SEO description.

Page titles. Your subtitles, or headings, should include the keywords used throughout the body of your paper, article, essay, or story.

Titles or nouns that are descriptive of what you’re offering to the readers should be linked.

This takes practice to perfect and not every article is going to be a smashing success. Honestly, there are many out there that are more successful than this one. But, the fact that I have a loose understanding of SEO, how to place keywords throughout the story as I’m writing and editing, and keep practicing and honing my work, has brought me to the point of writing the occasional 300.00 dollar article.

Patience pays off when it comes to finding your niche or finding your groove with SEO practices. One thing that I found was also helpful was utilizing a headline analyzer. Go to headlines.sharethrough.com and try theirs. It's free and easy to use.

Sharethrough has a free-to-use headline analyzer that will help you to maximize the effectiveness of your headlines. Your headline, along with the main image, are the two things that will work in conjunction to attract a prospective reader into clicking and opening your articles and stories. Getting perspective readers to open the article is the first step in getting someone to read your work.

In the above image, I used a made-up title. That’s not to say that Facebook’s new security protocols haven’t irritated some people. But, “Facebook Loses Billions And It’s Funny Because Their New Security Protocols Are Irritating Users,” scores an 83 out of 100.

This is where you have a chance to work out your headline. By simply changing the start of the Facebook Title the score raises to 84. Share through even provides suggestions on how to raise your score. Ideally, a score of 100, is the most promising headline and can get you (theoretically) more reads.

Write timely, cover interesting stories, and utilize the method above and anyone can copy this college dropout's success story, over and over again!

Conclusion

Honestly, when I first started on Medium and Vocal it took me a long time to get my head wrapped around search engine optimization, keywords, and the rest of the tools available to writers today. If I can manage to make it work once, and then make it work again, then you can too. Patience is going to be key. I reread SEO articles multiple times. My first article to be successful sat for 29 days before it started getting the number of reads it has gotten so far. By using SEO (search engine optimization), keywords, and a headline analyzer my articles overall are doing better with each month, and checking my stats makes me smile almost every time. I’d note, that I’m only seven months into taking this seriously so I can’t wait to see how the rest of 2022 goes.