How To Write Articles

Writing articles is one of the best ways there is to create quality content for your website. It is also a proven method for getting focused traffic and helping you gain higher rankings with the search engines.

That is quite a bit for something as simple as an article!

Here are some general tips that must be followed, plus they actually make the process much easier.

• Write naturally. Writing unnaturally is one of the most common mistakes there is. In our attempts to be clever, informative, unique or to impress the search engines, we often become unnatural in our writing.

Write for people, not robots. In fact, the robots will favor you if you write to please the reader. Think about it: Google, Yahoo and Bing are in the business of providing relevant content to the people doing searches on their search engines. If they can provide quality content, the customer will return, again and again. So, it is in their best interest to favor well written, relevant, and informative content.

• Do not stuff keywords. If your article is based around a keyword such as “iPod for Spanish”, you don't need to construct odd sounding sentences that always contain that exact phrase. Use it in the beginning, and after that just make sure the words are present in any order that makes sense.

As long as the words are in the article, the robots will find them and connect them. You can see this in the analytics of your site by looking at which keywords people used to find your site. It is very often various combinations of your keywords, not just “iPod for Spanish”, for example.

• Make sure the article is at least 350 words in length. I generally try to make them between 450 and 500 words. Longer than that is OK, but probably is not worth the extra effort. The readers are usually looking for something in particular, and more or less skim the articles. Internet reading is much different than reading a book.

For Articlez.com, the payment is for a 350 to 400 word article. This is fine, I can always add more of what I think is lacking or could be improved upon.

• Latent Semantic Indexing is a very interesting concept. It is used by the search engines to analyze web pages for relevant content. What this really means is that the articles should contain words that are sort of surrounding the topic. For example: if you are writing about bicycles, you would make sure to include words and phrases that are related to bicycles.

This could be such things as bicycle pumps, riding apparel, hydration packs, head lamps, bike tours, bike clubs, helmets, bicycle manufacturers, and so on. Look at the article as part of a topic, not so much as a stand alone item. These terms are sometimes called secondary, or tertiary terms.

• Use a template, such as the ones suggested by EzineArticles. These make the process much easier to tackle and enables the article to be more coherent. Here is the link to the all kinds of tips and pointers for writing good articles. You will find a link for templates as well. If your articles please EzineArticles, they will please just about anyone!

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