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Choose what every article includes

Settings › Articles sets each article's length, what sits at the top, the parts it always has, its images and your own notes.

Written By Damian

Last updated About 2 hours ago

Settings › Articles sets how every article CitedSEO writes for your site is built: how long it is, what sits at the top, which parts it always has, its images, and any notes of your own. Every article is written to these settings and checked against them. Every site starts with each article sized to the pages that already rank for its search, with key takeaways, a table of contents, questions and answers, sources and structured data.

Change anything on the page, then press Save changes in the bar at the bottom. Discard puts it back as it was.

Shape

Settings › Articles › Shape: Length, and the three choices for Summary at the top

Length is Whatever the topic needs unless you change it. That sizes each article to the pages that rank for its search. A set length replaces that:

LengthWords aimed for
Short, about 1,000 words800 to 1,200
Medium, about 2,000 words1,700 to 2,300
Long, 3,000 words or more3,000 to 4,500

An article far from its length gets one try at a fix. Length never stops an article from going live.

Summary at the top is what an article opens with:

  • Key takeaways: three to five bullets, written once the article is finished.
  • Short answer: one paragraph that answers the question.
  • None: straight into the article.

What's in every article

What's in every article: Table of contents, Questions and answers, Sources and Structured data, each with its switch

SwitchWhat it adds
Table of contentsA list of the article's sections, linked, after the summary.
Questions and answersAnswers to what people also ask about the search, at the end. AI assistants quote these often. Off, articles have none.
SourcesLinks at the end to the pages its facts and figures came from, each once. Your own pages aren't listed.
Structured dataMarkup readers don't see that tells Google and AI assistants what the page is: an article with its dates, author, publisher, word count and sources, the questions and answers when it has them, and where it sits on your site.

All four are on unless you turn them off. Table of contents and Structured data are added as an article goes to your site, so a change shows on your feed straight away, and on WordPress the next time each article is published or updated.

Images

The style comes from Settings › Brand.

  • Cover image: at the top of the article and when it's shared.
  • Images in the article: where a picture helps. The pages that rank decide how many.

Anything else

Notes for every article, in your own words, one per line, such as "Use US spelling." Each line is one of the checks on every article, shown as Follows your note with the note beside it. An article that doesn't follow one stops at its checks and isn't published, so keep each note to something an article can follow.

What you save applies to the articles CitedSEO writes and checks from then on.

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