4 Things You Must Do If You Want To Write Effective Articles For The Web

Copyright 2006 B Hopkins If you want a website that brings in the search engines AND keeps visitors on your website, you need to have information that is relevant, informative and well written. However, when using methods that are designed to attract search engines, the content still needs to be keyword-rich. How can you keep content keyword rich and still be of value to the visitor? 1. Write articles that are helpful, but not too long The more words you can say something on the better. Keep articles short (400-800 words) or the search engines may not 'read' all the way through. Creating many articles and optimizing the content in the article will allow you to target more keywords than if you try to cram them all onto one article. Content such an artice, is useful for creating traffic, pleasing the search engines and offering valuable information to your visitors. 2. Write articles that are relevant to your business or website Keeping to a theme when writing your articles, will help your website both with the search engines and visitors. Keyword-rich articles will likely be relevant or you wouldn't choose them. If you are allowing others to post your articles on their sites, the tighter the focus of the subject of your articles, the better your site will rank in the search engines for specific keywords. 3. Write articles that are informative Getting traffic is not valuable to you if people leave your site right away. Providing informative content will keep visitors on your site longer, and is also important to 'smarter' search engines which also pick up on the content. If your articles are made up of keywords and phrases strung together, the search engine may discount it. There are grammatical rules that some search engines may use as a basis for weeding out optimized sites from the truly informative sites. Obviously the search engines won't really know if the content is of any value to your visitors - only you can know that - but if you are taking the time to sit and write editorial for your website, you'd do well to make it of value to the reader. 4. Make your articles unique The algorithms are constantly changing, but currently it has been stated that the search engines don't like duplicate content. That is why many affiliate businesses that set up new websites for each member are often unable to make a top showing in the search engine results becasue of too many of the same website. Writing your own articles or hiring a ghost writer to write them for you will work better. Using 'free to reprint' articles may work, depending on the amount of times that work has been reprinted. In every case, do not duplicate the webpage of another site - both for ethical reasons and the fact that it will not bode well for your search engine status. If you are using a template site you will need to change a significant amount of the information in order to create a site that the search engines will consider as unique. You can do this by changing your web page title, meta tags, introducing paragraph and by inserting links or editorial blocks within the article body. Unique content is also important to visitors who may be viewing other related websites and are looking for fresh information on the topic. By providing unique content you will stand out from the crowd. When you have these 4 things in place, you are well on your way to writing successful articles that will draw responsive traffic to your website and will begin to create a reputation for you of being an expert in your field.