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SEO Article Writing Done Right
Posted by IMer | Posted in Article Marketing | Posted on 25-03-2009
Article writing has become one of the most popular ways to get links and get search engine traffic for many savvy website owners. It’s free and it works. Simple as that. But, as with most things associated with online marketing, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do SEO article writing. Here are three tips to help you with writing better articles for maximum optimization results.
#1 – Keyword Research
The mistake many new SEO article marketers make is jumping right in and writing their brains out. They skip what is, in many ways, the most important and crucial step in the process: keyword research. It seems like a simple concept once you learn it, but new marketers fail to wrap their heads around this. The bottom line is that you will fail in your SEO efforts if you aren’t writing articles around proper keyword phrases.
You need to get yourself a good keyword research tool, such as Google’s External Keyword Tool or Wordtracker. Now, a lot of newer marketers get this far, then make the second big mistake in SEO: going after high competition keywords. Unless you have months to invest without any real return on that investment, it’s a bad idea to optimize articles around highly competitive keywords. Instead, look for keywords you can apply SEO to with a realistic shot at reaching Page 1 at Google and the other top search engines. These are known as ‘longtail’ keywords. An example would be going after ‘how to train a dog’ instead of ‘dog training.’ You have a reasonable chance at writing an SEO article and getting it to a Top 10 ranking with the longer phrase. You have virtually no chance to get one written around ‘dog training’ anywhere near the Top 100, let alone the Top 10 – at least not anytime soon. Find the longtails!
#2 – Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)
OK, once you’ve finished the research to find longtail keywords that are useful in your SEO efforts, you’ll want to write articles that include not only the keyword phrase in question, but also related words that are positioned close to the words in the target phrase. This is known as Latent Semantic Indexing, or LSI for short. The idea is to help the robots the search engines use figure out with better precision just what your article is about. So, using the above example (‘how to train a dog’), you’d want to use words like ‘dogs,’ ‘training,’ ‘puppy,’ ‘trainer,’ and so on.
The exact power of this SEO article writing tactic is unknown (outside of Google), but enough testing has been done to be sure that it’s worth adding to your articles. Don’t go overboard, by the way. Just create a short list of related words for every longtail keyword phrase you come up with, and sprinkle those words in here and there. Don’t let this interfere with the naturalness of your writing, however. It just takes a bit of practice to get proficient.
#3 – Links
OK, the last piece of the SEO puzzle is to get a few links pointing to your articles after they’re posted. Often, the difference between a Page 1 ranking and oblivion is a good link or two. This is especially true with SEO articles written around longtail keywords, because the competition is so much lower. Wherever you get the links, the big key is to use the longtail phrase you targeted in your article as the anchor text in the links pointing back to it. What’s anchor text? That’s just the words you make clickable in any link. Instead of just having the URL be the part you click in your link, you want to make the longtail keyword the clickable part. This tells the search engines that the page being linked to is about the words in that link.
There you have it. Follow these three basic tips and you’ll get better at writing a good article and see significant improvement in your SEO article writing results.
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