Writing content that ranks: nine rules that still hold

Answer the question in the first paragraph. Everything else on this list is second to that. It is the rule broken most often by people who have read a lot of advice about writing for search.

Someone arriving from a search has a question. If the page opens with three hundred words of context, they leave, and both the reader and the ranking are lost for the same reason.

1. Answer first, then explain

Put the answer in the opening two sentences. Then earn the rest of the page by explaining how you know, what the exceptions are, and what to do next.

This is also what gets a passage quoted in an AI answer or a featured snippet. An extractable answer has to exist somewhere for something to extract it.

2. Write for one question per page

A page covering four related questions answers each one at a quarter depth and competes with itself for all four. Split it. Link the pieces together.

3. Use headings that match how people ask

A heading that reads “Considerations” tells a reader nothing and matches nothing anyone typed. “How long does it take to see results” matches a real query and tells a skimmer whether to stop scrolling.

Write the headings as the questions they answer.

4. Make it specific enough to be wrong

Generic advice is safe and worthless. “Improve your page speed” is generic. “Serve the hero image at the size it displays, in WebP, and set width and height on the tag” is specific, checkable and useful.

Specific claims can be disagreed with, and that is what makes them worth reading.

5. Say when it was written and when it changed

Visible dates. A reader deciding between your page and another one uses the date before anything else. Hiding it looks like you have something to hide.

If the content is still correct, say what you checked and when. If it is not, fix it.

6. Put the structure in the HTML

One h1. Headings in order, without skipping levels for visual reasons. Lists where the content is a list. Tables where the content is a table.

This is how the page gets parsed by anything that is not a human, and it is how a screen reader user moves through it. Both audiences want the same thing.

7. Link out to sources you actually used

Citing a real source makes a claim checkable and is one of the few signals a reader can evaluate directly. It also stops you from writing the kind of confident unsourced sentence that makes an article useless.

If you have no source, restate the claim as a mechanism the reader can verify themselves.

8. Write internal links into the body, with real anchor text

“Click here” wastes the strongest on-page signal you control. Link the phrase that describes the destination, from a sentence where the reader would plausibly want to go there.

Three or four good internal links beat twenty automatic ones.

9. Cut the introduction after you finish

Almost every draft has an opening paragraph that exists because the writer was warming up. Delete it. The article usually starts at what was the second or third paragraph, which is also where the answer was.

What this does not cover

None of this ranks a page on a site that cannot be crawled. None of it beats a genuinely better page, written by someone with more direct experience of the problem.

Writing well is the part you control. The rest is technical work and time.