Writing titles to optimize online health articles

Are your article/page titles unique enough for readers and search engines? Real readers love clever titles, but with all the talk about the importance of keywords, you may end up with every article title sounding the same or at least too similar. If that’s the case with your website, readers may skip several of your articles because they think they’ve already read it. And guess what — so will the search engines.

Without regular readers and crawlers, your site’s page ranking in Google and other search engines will suffer. If you think your titles are unique, take a second look to make sure your title tags are working for you. Sometimes people tweak, edit, and change the article’s title after they’ve cut and pasted the draft into their web page template. So your title may sound unique, but the tag something more generic and familiar.

Once you’ve published the article, you probably shouldn’t go changing your tags. But before you press publish on your next article, check the title tag to make sure it’s working for you. The tag doesn’t need to match the title of the article, but it should say what the article is about and not be easily confused with your other page titles.

For example, let’s say your website is all the health benefits of fish oil. One article is about heart health and fish oil, another is about arthritis and fish oil, and a third is about how to choose one type of fish oil supplement over another. One is good, but if all three drafts started out with working titles like “Healthy Fish Oil,” Fish Oil and Health,” and Heart-Healthy Fish Oil,” you really need to change the titles and the title tags to something more specific and unique.

Write your actual title to attract readers and the title tags to optimize your article in search engines.

Try something like this instead:

Title: 5 Reasons the American Heart Association Recommends Fish Oil

Tag: fish-oil-for-heart-health

Title: Juice Your Joints With Omega-3 Fatty Acids

Tag: joint-pain relief-and-omega-3

Title: What’s in Your Fish Oil Supplement?

Tag: whats-in-your-fish-oil-supplement

Happy Health Writing,

Kathy Summers

Tap into health search trends in a recession

Do people search on different words and phrases in a difficult economy? Absolutely. So, if you want people to find your health and fitness writing — and your website — tie your articles into the trends.

For example, people are currently searching more for ways to deal with stress and sleep problems. You can capture more online eyeballs by working these themes into your content. Think your product or service has nothing to do with stress or insomnia? Let’s say you sell exercise equipment, or diabetes supplies, or diet books, blood pressure medicine, or Alzheimer’s support services. Yup, sleep and stress are directly related.

People are also watching their pennies, so they’re thinking longer before deciding where to spend. This gives you a chance to wow them knowledge and understanding, build trust, and possibly capture a life-long customer.

Happy Health Writing,

Kathy Summers

LSI – language at heart

Lots of web publishers seem to be looking for cheap SEO writers on auction sites. They give instructions on the exact percentage of keywords they want for “original” content totalling so many words. They’ve learned that loading too many keywords into the mix doesn’t work so well anymore. Some have gotten hip to Semantic Language (SL, or using a few different phrases that mean the same thing) so they demand that, too. Often they need around 50 articles right off the bat, and for that some say they will pay $1 per article, or something similar. Simple, right? They will, no doubt, get what they pay for.

The problem is, as soon as you think you know how to work the system, someone discovers a new wrinkle. Case in point, Google’s Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). Some publishers confuse LSI with SL (see above), which is an entirely different algorithm. By using LSI, Google can spot all your SL phrases in a heartbeat and discount them as so much of the same.

For example, if you’re writing about natural solutions to reducing hair loss in men, you’d strategically use the key phrases “male patten baldness,” “MPD” and baldness in men” a calculated number of times. The problem is your math could actually be way off. Google may count them all as one and the same. That will triple your key word count and may look to the search engines like keyword stuffing, resulting in lower search results.

The important thing to remember is that LSL is less about semantics and more about the common words and phrases search engines expect to find naturally surrounding any given key word or phrase. If you’re writing around the key phrases “fat loss” and “diet pills,” for example, but you don’t mention anything about protein, calories, or basic food groups, Google won’t find your article all that relevant for people looking for good information about losing weight.

So how do you write your way out of this predicament? Start by going to the search engines and plugging in your key words and phrases. Then take a close look at the sites that rank the highest. What words and phrases do they have in common? Don’t copy them, but you can see how writing relevant content works. Then apply the concept to your own health and fitness article writing.  Give readers what they want — well-researched, tightly focused health, fitness, and nutrition articles that answer their burning questions — and the search engines will pay it forward with lots of latent link love.

Happy Health Writing,

Kathy Summers

Form follows function in online health articles

It seems that as soon as web publishers find out a little about SEO, they become a little OCD about it, stuffing every page with so many keywords and phrases they end up turning away their real readers.

There are so many websites now that offer nothing by mind-numbing quick gropes for attention. But people are wiser now and many get annoyed by these tactics. Well-integrated keywords and phrases are great when they slip seamlessly into your core message. But when they don’t fit, don’t sweat it.

If your content is valuable to real readers, they will trust you and keep coming back to read more. When you write articles for your blog or company page, or e-commerce site that puts real people before robots, you may actually reap your desired rewards. Some SEO experts now say this is the new route to high search engine page rank.

As they say in architecture school, form follows function.

Happy Health Writing,

Kathy Summers

Is your health website losing page rank?

If you’ve looked at your stats lately, you may have noticed your carefully worded and placed SEO health, nutrition, or fitness content losing its strong page rank. Even if your page was in Google’s top spot for your chosen key words and phrases, you won’t stay there unless you keep your content fresh and current, especially when it comes to health content.  Here’s why.

Problem #1: Although page history is a good thing, search engines and real readers get bored with old, stale content.

Solution: Switch it up a bit. Add a paragraph here, take one out there, add a chart or graph, chunk the article up with some subheads. A few tweaks here and there are all you need to make your copy sparkle like new.

Problem #2: Old articles lose credibility. This is especially the case with health, nutrition, and fitness content because as new study results get traction in the press, old articles no longer address the current scientific thinking on your specific topic.

Solution: Is there a news item that supports your web site’s theme? Update your aging article with the new information. Has a new study debunked one of your claims for a neutraceutical you sell, or a fitness method you promote? Write a rebuttal or show where the research is limited (without sounding defensive).

Show that your website still has a pulse and you’ll stay alive in the search engines and attract living, breathing readers.

Happy Health Writing,

Kathy Summers

Link-seeding your health articles and blog posts

When people search on a health problem or nutrient plus ailment and find your site, you’d probably love to land them on your products page so they can start buying. That’s not the way it always works, especially when your site is new. Having lots of articles and blog posts on your website helps people find your site in the search engines. When they land on your article or blog page, assuming it’s relevant to their search, they’ll read about the ailment they’re concerned about. This primes them to believe your product is what they must be looking for, the answer to their problem. Link seeding helps you move people from one page on your site (the entry point) to another page and eventually to the buy button.

Basically, link seeding is linking from your article to another article or page on your website from within the article. These internal links are not only important to help people navigate and stay on your site long enough to become customers, they also help with SEO because the search engines will register more links to your pages. Because internal links, if done correctly, encourage people to stay on your site longer and check out more pages, you get the double benefit of converting more peopole to buyers, and boosting SEO because the search engines will register longer visits and traffic to more pages per visit on your website.

How you write and phrase your internal links also effects search engine optimization. It’s works to your advantage if you link some of your key words and phrases rather than something too generic. Here’s an example. If you sell fitness products, for example, you might have an article describing all the health benefits of using, let’s say kettlebells. You can simply link on a word, like I just did in the previous sentence. If the reader is curious he will click on the link to see where it goes. You can have it go to the next step, maybe a more specific article, sales page, or spec sheet. On the other hand, if you sell a Joe Buff’s brand kettlebells and you put your link on Joe’s name, you’re doing more to boost Joe’s SEO than your own.

The word “kettlebell” in my example is called anchor text or link label. The clickable text doesn’t have to match the hyperlink. In my example, the url links to http://www.healthwriting.com/kettlebells, an article I wrote for Pilates Style magazine, which I now archive on this website as a sampe article (also available for reprint with permission). The title of the article is “Bell Curves” but I purposely made the hyperlink, and the anchor text in the example, say “kettlebells” because that’s how people will search. The point of link seeding, though, is that the words contained in the anchor text can boost ranking for your chosen search terms, the ones you want to point people to your website when they search on them. Also, for best search engine results, keep your anchor texts less than 60 characters.

Happy Health Writing,

Kathy Summers