Andrew Riedel, SEO Gold Coast
One aspect of search engine optimisation that works very, very well is article writing.
Article writing should always play a very important part of your efforts to achieve online visibility and that coveted place on the first page of google.
Article Writing for Directories
Articles writing is done for a variety of reasons and, for today, I am writing about articles that are meant purely for the article directories. The most well known and visited article directory is Ezine Articles but there are literally thousands of directories that you can submit your well written, unique articles to.
When article writing is purely for the article directories what you are trying to achieve primarily is to get lots of backlinks for your website. In addition, a quality article with a great title is going to get noticed. What happens next is some people will be enticed to visit your website and others will want to copy the article for their own sites.
Article Writing Rules
When you write an article for the directories you should be aware of a some rules and guidelines.
1/. The first rule of article writing is to write unique content. This basically means that your articles are not copied content. If you find some material on the web that your would like to incorporate into your article make sure that you rewrite it in your own words and ensure it is at least 40 to 50% unique.
2/. The second rule or guideline to follow is that you should position your keywords strategically and not stuff the article so full of keywords that it just doesn’t make for good reading.
Make sure you place your main keyword in the title of the article, in the first sentence, somewhere in the middle of the article and then as close as possible to the end of the article. My keyword for this article is “Article Writing”. You can see this keyword in the title and now you can see I’ve cleverly inserted it into the body of the article as well!
There is a lot of debate in the article writing community about keyword density. Should it be 2%, 3%, 4% or 5% or even more. Most of the article writing bloggers that I have read tend to agree that a keyword density of somewhere in the range of 2.5% to 3.5% is ideal. Personally I find that around 2% works best for me. Any more and the article starts to sound a bit repetitive.
3/. Article writing rule 3 is to keep your articles to around 400 to 500 words give or take a few words. Some articles can be as long as 1000 words if the content is interesting. In the case of a longer article you might want to break it into Part 1 and Part 2
4/. The fourth article writing “rule” is the end of your article should intrigue the reader enough to want to find out more. The way you can do this is to create a bio or resource box which finishes off the article and asks the reader to take action.
5/. Create a bio or resource box. The resource box is where you finish off the article, with a call to action and this is where you can have 2 links to your website. One of these links should be an anchor text link. This is where your keyword is “clickable” and linked to your website. Some sites only allow 1 link so always check before you submit the fruits of your article writing efforts.
To find our more about article writing and how we can help you create great articles and backlinks so that your website can be found online, contact us at SEO Gold Coast.