Writing Optimized Articles

September 21, 2005 – 3:00 am

Search engines give the highest organic ranking to authority sites. These are sites that have lots of unique and relevant information which makes people want to link to the site. One way to build up this information is by developing articles related to your business or industry. These articles should be optimized in order for you to get the benefit of increased ranking on various search engines. The goal is to put these articles on your website and also optimize them to be indexed by search engines.

To write an optimized article you should choose a topic that is related to your business and website. Do not copy content from your site. It should be original as search engines do not like duplicated content.

How is this done? The article should be optimized for a particular keyword. So if your keyword is ‘Online Soccer Game’ and you wanted to write an article about the ‘basic rules’ of Online Soccer Game you may go about the article like this.

1. Locate Keywords in Title
   The article title should incorporate the keywords. The title informs the search engine of the content of the page. Enclose the title with an h1 tag as certain search engines may give this more weight. For example: ‘Online Soccer Game – The Basic Rules’
2. Locate Keywords throughout the Content
   Incorporate the keyword into what you write. The theme of the article should revolve around the keyword. As the keyword will be closely related to the content and it is your area of expertise this should not be too challenging. Use common sense while doing this and write for the reader – not the search engine. Aim for around 600+ words.
3. Locate Keyword in First Paragraph
   The first paragraph is generally the most important and search engines put more weight on this than the paragraphs that come after it. Therefore make sure your keyword is as near to the top of this paragraph as possible. This should be easy if it is the topic of your article. This is also the part of the article that draws in the reader, captures their attention and entices them to read further.
4. Locate Keyword in Final Paragraph
   Certain search engines may give extra weight to the final paragraph, so include the keyword in a summary.
5. Locate Keywords in Subheadings
   Search engines can look at the subheadings within an article and give them extra weight especially if they are enclosed within h2 or h3 HTML tags. They do this to find out the relevancy of the page content. Subheadings are also often scanned by online readers. For example: ‘Online Soccer Game and The Offside Rule’

Inject your personality into your writing and try to connect with your visitors. This connection will make your visitors feel that they belong. Informal, friendly, conversational language works best.

When writing the article the key is to have the subject matter of your article relate to your keywords. This will make it easy to write for both the article reader and the search engine. You should also include a brief biography about yourself and include a hot link to your website so that if your article is picked up you get acknowledgment and your website gets a valuable link.

Article Distribution Channels

You can submit your article to the publishers of your choice. This can be a time consuming process so you may want to save time and use an article distributor. There are many article distribution channels (also known as ‘content hubs’) that you can use. Do a search and you will see things like ‘we will distribute your article to 20,000+ publishers’ for example. Most of these distribution services charge you for the service. There are a few things you should find out.

• How many people will receive the article?
• Who will receive the article?
• Will the article copyright remain with you?
• Will your websites hyperlink be submitted and remain active?

Distribution services will submit your article to websites, blogs, newsletters, etc and so it will spread throughout the internet. Links from your articles on all these sites will point back directly to your website. This results in increased search engine rankings and also increased traffic to your site.

Publishers are always on the lookout for great articles. The benefits of optimizing articles for you are great. And it is a long term strategy. Articles have longevity in that they often receive greater exposure over time as they are picked up and redistributed by other publishers. This increases your exposure and the total links to your site.