Questions asked by contributors:
How important is the SEO and should each article have a good SEO score?
It is not necessary to have good SEO to publish an article, but your articles will reach more people with good SEO. The Speaker is a Google News-ranked site as well, and all search engines “see” an article based on its SEO. If an article has a title and a specified keyword, search engines should be able to find it and understand it. If it has further SEO, search engines will be able to understand where they should display it and who they should show it to. Any post has competitors in search engine rankings, and SEO, when done to help the search engine place the article where you want it, can help you beat your competition.
How to do SEO: Decide your keyword (for example, “NASA,” “Tibet,” or “Scientific research”). Your title will perform better if it has your keyword in it (in the first 80 characters — search engines can’t display more than 80 characters, and shorter titles generally do better in search engines). Placing the keyword at the beginning of the title helps in SEO, but it isn’t always possible to write a title based on a keyword.
Place your keyword in the text of your article a few times, particularly in the first sentence. Related keywords are also valued by search engines — for example, if your keyword is “NASA,” related keywords might be “Curiosity,” “Curiosity rover,” “Orion spacecraft,” “Asteroid,” “Mars,” and “space.” If your keyword is “Tibet,” “China,” “protest,” “oppression,” “prison,” and “self immolation” might be related keywords you want to include for the sake of SEO.
Having a featured image helps SEO, as does having a few images within the text of your article. Images should have titles and alt-text that include the keyword, or are just the keyword. You do not need captions or descriptions for SEO in 2015.
In the Yoast SEO section of the post editor, you should always add a “primary keyword.” This is your keyword. Most people also add related keywords, then (as long as it is a news story) they click on the news tab and add the same or similar related keywords in the “news keywords” section. Some people write an SEO-friendly snippet, too. This is what people will see when your article comes up in their search result, and the text will be analyzed by search engines as explained above.
The Yoast SEO section will also analyze your article in a way similar to the main search engines, and will tell you what could be done to improve your ranking in search.
What are some SEO don’ts?
Although you must always include the source for any information, and attribute credit to other news outlets whose work your article uses, you should never link text to their webpage that includes your keyword or related keywords. Doing so will hurt the article in search engines. Instead, link the name of the publication or the word source.
How do I write movie titles, book titles, song titles, album titles (works of art):
Capitalize and put them in quotations (note punctuation): “Lincoln,” “Les Miserables,” “Life of Pi,” “Skyfall” and “Argo.”
Examples: He rented “Star Wars” on DVD. She read “War and Peace.”
(Do not use quote marks with reference books or the names of newspapers or magazines.)
Can you explain quotation marks and other punctuation:
Periods and commas are ALWAYS inside quotation marks. Other punctuation: it depends. Is the punctuation part of the quote? In news writing, it almost always is, because reporters aren’t usually themselves asking questions or exclaiming.
Examples: Participants who kept dream diaries described themselves as “introspective” and “thoughtful.” Many dream images were characterized as “raw,” “powerful,” and “evocative.” The Dream Questionnaire items included “How often do you remember your dreams?” and “What do you most often dream about?” We found intriguing results.
What do you think he meant by, “You use punctuation incorrectly”?
More information on quotations and punctuation