Article Writing Tips - Writing Articles For High Listings

Before providing you with article writing tips, it is important that you understand why writing articles should be important to you. Some of it is due to Google's beneficence with respect to the power of article directories, and even more is related to the even greater importance of offering useful and genuine content on your website.

First, let's agree on the definition of an article, since mine is unlikely to be yours. To me, an article is written content that provides non-commercial information about a specific topic. So adverts are not articles, and neither are reviews. What I am writing now is an article. Articles are important because search engine algorithms have been written to detect good quality content that provides useful information on a specific topic as defined by the search term, or keyword, used by the search engine user.

A good article can work wonders for your website because it offers you 5 benefits:

1. Google PageRank votes from directories that accept your article for publication.
2. The same votes from web pages to which your article has been copied.
3. Clicks to your site from the web pages referred to in item 2.
4. Clicks to your site from readers of your article on the directories.
5. Free advertising through high listings of your article on search engines.

Most benefit comes from items 1, 4 and 5, with 5 in the majority. Writing articles is the best way to advertise your website and individual pages within it, and these article writing tips are intended to help you make the most of the articles that you write.

First, it is not essential for you to write your own articles. You can pay to have them written for you by a professional article ghostwriter, but you have more control over how you present your content by writing them yourself. Here are a few article writing tips to help you get most benefit from the articles that you write.

USE OF KEYWORDS

Keyword Choice

Your article should be search engine optimized for specific keywords, and not just written in a literary sense. In this article I have chosen two keywords: 'article writing tips' and 'writing articles'. One, the latter of the two, has a fairly high demand (people using it to search) with not an excessive supply (other pages using it) while 'article writing tips' has a demand of 1000/month but a very low supply. 'Article writing' is another keyword there, with a larger demand than either of the above two.

Keyword Use

So, I have included 3 good keywords in my title. That is important since the title is what potential readers of your article will see first. You should also do as I have done, and use the keywords in the first 100 characters of your article (including spaces). The search engine spiders give highest weighting to words contained in these characters. You must, however, avoid excessive use of the keyword. 1% keyword density is enough.

Article Semantics

Google uses the latent semantic indexing (LSI) algorithm in calculating the relevance of your article to the keyword. This means the use of vocabulary related to the keyword, and using words that explain exactly the meaning of your article.

IMPORTANT SECTIONS

The important sections of your article are the title, the first 100 characters, the opening paragraph, the final paragraph, the resource and the summary. The last two are important only when your articles are written for distribution.

The resource is where you advertise yourself and your website or product. Try to persuade your readers to click to the web page you want them to visit, and when they do make it worth their while. You should be confident in telling them exactly what you want them to do, as I am doing here, and the way to achieve that is to be honest in what you say, and deliver what you offer.

Finally, write naturally, as if you were speaking to a person. In that way you should avoid the problems that you could get yourself into by trying to write for a search engine - never forget that people read your website content and people buy your products.

If you put these article writing tips into practice, you should see an improvement in traffic to your website. Writing articles can be one of the best internet marketing promotional techniques available to you, and is not only free but extremely effective if done properly.

These are just a few of the many article writing tips you will find on Pete's website Article Czar where, in addition to free gifts, Pete offers you a free article writing course. His site Article Services also offers his article ghostwriting service.