by John Hewitt

Created on: June 29, 2009   Last Updated: July 10, 2009

One of the best ways to get good exposure and receive good traffic for your articles is to treat each article as if it were a single web page in its own right.

When building a website you choose a good, memorable name and you ensure that the relevant keywords are placed naturally within the content to aid in search engine recognition. The same can be said for article writing, and treating articles in this manner will help in bringing you increased traffic. Whether you want traffic to promote your site, your business or you need page views for revenue income, ensuring that your article is search engine friendly can really make a difference.

Now assuming that you are writing about a topic that will be popular, your first step would be the title itself. Obviously if you wish to write an article on "rabbits" then having a title such "They're fury, they're cute and kids love 'em" will not help people find that article. You obviously then need to include those relevant keywords within the title.

A good habit to form is to imagine that you are someone who is looking for your article. In other words if you wanted to find out the information that you are providing what would YOU type into a search engine such as Google? "Rabbits", "Rabbits as pets", "Keeping a rabbit for a pet"? A fantastic tool is the Google Adwords keywords tool. This will allow you to enter a particular word or phrase and see the volume of queries that relate to your subject. You can also copy and paste the text of your article to see the keywords that Google picks up and again see the relevancy and the popularity of those words. This can help in adjusting the title of your article as well as the content.

Obviously what you want to do is to have a good flowing article with valuable content that the reader will find useful. The worst thing to read is the "keyword stuffed" article that reads like a list of keywords rather than an informational product. So always keep the article natural and with your readers in mind.

I first write a natural and flowing article and then take a look at the keywords after the article is completed. If I cannot find the relevant keywords picked up then I can tweak the article slightly and improve upon its potential for search engine optimization. I also ensure that my title is relevant and easy to find; it should not be too obscure. I then check that the content is relevant to the title. This may sound obvious but I have often been caught up in my own flow that I found that I had gone off topic and the title no longer reflected what I was writing about in the first place.

These are all simple and obvious points yet points that I am still adjusting. A good experiment, especially if you are a member of an online article site, is to generate an article with a good title and deliberately leave keywords out relating to the subject matter. You can then see how many hits you get or if you can find your own article through a search engine. Then produce an article with the relevant keywords and see again what effect this has on views and search engine presence.

Remember that the focus is always good information, in addition to quality of writing. However, good keyword strategy can help get your article to those that matter; your readers.

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