SEO Article Writing: Avoid Common Formatting Mistakes
When writing SEO articles to submit to article directories, it’s very easy to miss some of the most common formatting errors, which can lead to your article being rejected or published but displayed in a very poor and poor way. professional. In either case, your SEO articles are unlikely to attract the attention they should, and may be rejected or ignored, neither of which is preferable.
However, with a few careful checks and precautions, it is possible to avoid many of the most common mistakes, helping to increase not only the readability and professionalism of your articles, but also the likelihood that they will be published in search directories. most reputable items.
Microsoft Word Smart Dating
If you’re using Microsoft Word, as many article writers do, then you may be a victim of its Smart Quotes feature. This feature was designed to make speech marks look a bit prettier in Microsoft Word documents by taking straight quotes and making them angled and slightly curved. A reasonably useless feature at best, but the main problem with this is the fact that no other program recognizes the symbol and it’s not compatible with web browsers (even Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer!)
This means that if you’ve included Smart Quotes in your SEO articles and then submitted them directly to an article directory or published them on your website, you’ll end up with Smart Quotes replaced with a lot of gibberish (that’s a technical word). )
The best solution is to simply disable Smart Quotes altogether, but don’t think this is as easy as it sounds. Lots of people have gone into the Options menu and deselected the Smart Quotes feature, but doing this once isn’t enough, you have to turn it off in two separate places! Remember, we are dealing with Microsoft!
To disable Smart Quotes, you will first need to click on the circular ‘Office’ symbol in the upper left corner of MS Word and then select ‘Word Options’ at the bottom of the menu that appears. Select ‘Proofing’ on the left side of the panel that should be displayed and then click the ‘Autocorrect Options’ button.
Now you need to select the ‘AutoFormat’ tab and uncheck the option to replace quotes with smart quotes. Once you have done this, you should also select the ‘Auto format as you type’ tab and do the same. Remember, you must uncheck the Smart Quotes option on BOTH tabs for the option to turn off.
Doing this won’t change the formatting of existing documents, only newly created ones, so you’ll still need to review previously written SEO articles and SEO content to make sure these silly quotes have been replaced with symbols recognized by web browsers. .
Formatted paragraphs
Although it is not an exclusive function of Microsoft Word, it is usually a problem caused by the use of this software. Very often when you start to write a new document in MS Word, the paragraph formatting will be set to ‘Normal’. This is a slightly misleading format name, as the paragraphs are anything but normal.
In fact, you will find that when you press ‘Enter’ once to create a new line break, the software will add an extra half-line space. This makes it look like the paragraphs are beautifully spaced, but it’s misleading. You’ll find out just how tricky this is if you copy and paste the text into Notepad. You will immediately see all the line breaks disappear and all the text become one big paragraph.
However, it is sometimes possible to copy and paste text into a web browser and still see it in the same format as it was in the original document. However, do not rely on this, because once your article has been submitted, the formatting will be removed.
To avoid this error, make sure to set paragraphs to ‘No Spacing’ from the start and always press ‘Enter’ twice to force a full line break between paragraphs.
hard line breaks
Almost all text-based or word processing applications used to write SEO articles include text wrapping as standard. Word wrapping is when text automatically starts a new line when it reaches the right side of the page. However, some text editors do not include this feature, and in some cases the feature may be disabled. If you are using an HTML editor to create articles, or if you are using Notepad, word wrapping may be disabled.
On its own this is not a problem, but it can cause writers to create a problem. Because if you’re typing and your text hits the end of the line, you might find yourself manually creating a new line. For you, on your screen, the text looks great, no problem. Except those line breaks you’ve added manually just make the text look good on your screen. Chances are, anyone else looking at your SEO article will have a very hard time trying to read it.
Be sure to press the ‘Enter’ key to create a new paragraph, never to just start the next line (unless you’re creating a bulleted list).
punctuation spacing
This is a huge topic and too complex to cover in this article. However, as a general rule of thumb, you should always make sure to only leave a single space after a comma, a period, a question mark, an exclamation point, a colon, and a semicolon, but never a space before it. Opening brackets must have a single space before but no spaces after, and closing brackets must have no space before and a single space after.
Some people believe in a rule that suggests that you should leave two spaces after a period. This was true in the old days of typewriters and low-quality fonts, but today that rule is outdated. Most modern word processing programs automatically adjust word spacing and punctuation, and leaving two spaces is now considered a formatting error.
special symbols
This tends to be a problem mainly if you try to include copyright or registered trademark symbols. It can also occur if you use formatted fractions and supernumerals such as those indicating a number raised to the power of another, or a square root.
The safest way to ensure that your SEO articles prevent these symbols from becoming unreadable is to write them long, so the copyright symbol should be written as (c) and a fraction like half should be written as 1/2. This way, you will be less likely to submit symbols that may not be recognized by some article directories or web browsers.
Although there are many more traps waiting to catch the unsuspecting SEO article writer, these five areas are the most common to look for. As with any SEO article, blog post, or other text post, always read the test very carefully. In most cases, it will catch many of the most common scoring errors before they do any damage.