How To Write Good Articles

In article marketing, you may end up taking the same article and submitting it to different sites in order to get more traffic. You will want to use the same mechanics of article writing that you would use to draw people to the content on your site and to make it people and search engine friendly. Article directories are highly indexed by search engines to begin with, but adding keywords in the right density can really boost your exposure with them in your targeted niche. Meanwhile, you also want to concentrate on making the articles easy to read, informative, and entertaining.

How to Be Search Engine Friendly

To be search engine friendly, you want to try to use keywords that are highly searched but are not too competitive to market online. For that, you'll want to check out the Google Keyword Tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. This tool is an easy way to brainstorm for keywords that you will add into your articles to help the search engine understand what your article is all about.

Some parts of the article have more weight than others when it comes to keywords. Titles, headings, and subheadings are lent more weight in the Google algorithm that scans each Web page to determine what the article is all about. If you can, try to use the keyword in your title and/or in a paragraph heading. Make sure to add the keywords to the tags too if they are requested by the article directory to help make searching within the article directory easier too.

How To Be People Friendly

Readers online don't always read the full article that they are surfing. Often, they might read the summary, the title, the first sentence, and then scan the page for bullets or small paragraphs. People just don't want to read a long article that has no white space and paragraph headings. It's not only hard on the eyes, but it doesn't suit the modern need to skim information to pick out relevant pieces without having to read an entire article, which few people have time to do. For that reason, keep it short, between 300 to 800 words at most, and always seek to give the reader a clue about what is being discussed before you actually dive into the details. 

Bulleted and numbered lists with headings on each item help to make very popular articles. They allow readers to skim each point and to only read the ones that interest them without needing to dwell too much on those that they already know or have no interest in. Try several different formats for layouts and see which one works best with your audience. 

What Not To Do When Article Marketing

When people first find out about article marketing, they get so enthusiastic that they tend to overdo things. They think that if a little of something works, then a lot of it should work more. It doesn't. In fact, in some cases, like when stuffing keywords in your articles too frequently, it can actually hurt you. Have a good understanding of the proper balance of a good article, and you'll always maintain a good online presence without being sandboxed by Google or being pegged as a spammer by visitors.

Don't Stuff Keywords

Keyword density should be between 1 and 2% of the overall word count of your articles. That means that within an article of 300 words, your chosen keyword might appear between 3 and 6 times. It's better to err on the side of less than more because, if you do end up putting in too many occurrences of a keyword to try to manipulate the search engines, what ends up happening is that you're not listed at all in the search results pages. That's what's called being “sandboxed” by Google, and it's a very bad thing to happen, particularly when your article marketing for the primary purpose to drive traffic back to your sites.

Don't Self-Promote in the Articles

Article directories have very precise terms of service for what you can and can't say within the context of the article itself. Self-promotion is limited to the resource box, where the author has the opportunity to link to outside resources and to say more about himself/herself. As for the article itself, it should be about the main topic and not about you or your business offerings; however, it should be relevant to the market niche that you currently market to with those products and services.

Don't Use Plagiarized Copy
 

It is possible to self-plagiarize on the Web, as many copy scanners won't know who the original author was and why an article shows up both on your website (where no name is given) and under your expert author profile in an article directory. In that case, Google will assume that you are using duplicate copy to stuff your website, and/or the article directory will think you are plagiarizing. Neither of these are good ways to start, so you should just avoid using copy from your website in article directories, as well as copy from other websites that aren't yours, so Google doesn't penalize your site and/or the administrators of the article directory don't label you as a plagiarist.