When writing SEO articles for submission to article directories it is very easy to overlook some of the most common formatting errors, which can result in either your article being declined, or being published but displayed in a very poor and unprofessional way. In either case it is unlikely that your SEO articles will attract the attention they should, and they may be declined or ignored – neither of which is preferable.
Yet 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 level of professionalism of your articles, but also the likelihood of them being published in the more reputable article directories.
Microsoft Word Smart Quotes
If you’re using Microsoft Word, as many article writers are, then you may be a victim of their Smart Quotes feature. This feature was designed to make speech marks look a little prettier in Microsoft Word documents, by taking straight quotes and making them angled and curved slightly. A reasonably useless feature at best, but the main problem with this is the fact that the symbol is not recognised by any other program, and not compatible with web browsers (even Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer!)
This means that if you have 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 the Smart Quotes replaced with a lot of gobbledegook (that’s a technical word.)
The best solution is to simply turn off Smart Quotes altogether – but don’t think this is as straightforward as it sounds. Many people have gone in to the Options menu and deselected the Smart Quotes feature, but doing this once is not enough- you have to switch it off in two separate places! Remember, this is Microsoft we’re dealing with!
To switch off Smart Quotes you’ll firstly need to click on the circular ‘Office’ symbol at the top left corner of MS Word, and then select ‘Word Options’ at the bottom of the menu which appears. Select ‘Proofing’ from the left hand side of the panel that should be displayed, and then click on the ‘Autocorrect options’ button.
Now you need to select the ‘Autoformat’ tab and uncheck the option to replace quotes with Smart Quotes. Once you’ve done this you then also need to select the ‘Autoformat as you type’ tab and do the same thing. Remember, you must uncheck the option for Smart Quotes on BOTH tabs for the option to actually be switched off.
Doing this won’t change the formatting of existing documents, only newly created ones, so you’ll still need to go through previously written SEO articles and SEO content to make sure that these silly quotes have been replaced with symbols recognised by web browsers.
Formatted Paragraphs
Although not exclusively a feature of Microsoft Word, this is most typically a problem caused by using this software. Very often when you start typing a new document in MS Word the paragraph formatting will be set as ‘Normal’. This is a slightly misleading format name, since the paragraphing is anything but normal.
In fact you’ll find that by pressing ‘Enter’ once to create a new line break, the software will add an extra half line’s space. This makes it look as though your paragraphs are beautifully spaced, but this is misleading. You’ll find out how misleading this is if you copy and paste the text into Notepad. Immediately you’ll see all of your line breaks vanish, and your entire text becomes one big paragraph.
However, sometimes it is possible to copy and paste text into a web browser and see it still formatted the same way it was in your original document. Don’t rely on this though, because once your article has actually been submitted the formatting will be removed.
To avoid this mistake, make sure that you set your paragraphing to ‘No spacing’ right from the start, and always press ‘Enter’ twice to force a full line break between paragraphs.
Hard Line Breaks
Almost all word processing or text based applications used for writing SEO articles include word wrapping as standard. Word wrapping is when the text automatically starts a new line when you reach the right hand side of the page. However, some text editors don’t include this feature, and in some cases the feature may be turned off. If you’re using an HTML editor to create articles, or if you’re using Notepad, you may find that word wrapping is switched off.
On its own, this isn’t a problem, but it can cause writers to create a problem. Because if you’re writing, and your text reaches the end of the line you may find yourself manually creating a new line. To you, on your screen, the text looks great – no problem at all. Except that those line breaks you’ve manually added yourself only make the text look right on your screen. The chances are that anyone else looking at your SEO article will have a very hard time trying to read it.
Make sure that you only ever press the ‘Enter’ key to create a new paragraph – never to simply start the next line, (unless it’s a bullet list you’re creating).
Punctuation Spacing
This is a huge topic and far too complex to cover in this article. However, as a general rule of thumb you should always make sure that you leave a single space after a comma, full-stop, question mark, exclamation mark, colon and semi colon, but never a space before. Opening brackets should have a single space before, but no space after, and closing brackets should have no space before and a single space after.
Some people believe in a rule that suggests you should leave two spaces after a full-stop. This was true in the old days of typewriters and poor quality fonts, but today such a rule is outdated. Most modern word-processing software automatically adjusts the spacing of words and punctuation, and leaving two spaces is now considered a formatting error.
Special Symbols
This tends to be a problem primarily if you try to include symbols for copyright or registered trademarks. It can also occur if you use formatted fractions, and super numerals such as those indicating a number raised to the power of another, or a square root.
The safest way of ensuring that your SEO articles avoid these symbols becoming unreadable is to write them the long way, so the copyright symbol should be written as (c) and a fraction such as a half should be written as 1/2. In this way you’ll be less likely to submit symbols which may be unrecognised by some article directories or web browsers.
Although there are many more pitfalls waiting to catch out the unwary writer of SEO articles, these five areas are the most common ones to watch. As with any SEO article, blog post or other text publication, always proof read very carefully. In most cases you’ll spot many of the more common punctuation errors before they do any harm.
