by A W Drake

Created on: August 06, 2010

It is often said that when writing an online article the author is writing for two audiences. There are the human readers and the search engine bots that will trawl content to calculate its relevance to the subject, and position it accordingly in search engine pages. For this reason being aware of  how to write an SEO friendly article is important to any online content creator.

The notion of creating an SEO friendly article can be daunting for the beginner, and whilst it involves adjusting your natural writing style a little, this can easily be achieved with a some practice. At the heart of writing an SEO friendly article is the concept of inserting keywords into the body of the article.

A keyword is a word or short phrase that encapsulates the subject of the article. For example, if you were to write an article on how to darn socks, the phrase 'darn socks' would be a keyword and so would the words 'darn' and 'socks'. As it trawls through your article, a search engine bot would determine its subject by the repetition of certain phrases, and so by including and repeating these  keywords in your article you are helping the bot to analyze its relevance .

The more a phrase is repeated, the more relevant the bot will assume your article is, which will help to determine its ranking in search engine placements. However, repeating keywords too frequently is regarded as keyword spamming for which your article will be penalized. There is no exact calculation for how often keywords should be repeated within an article, although it is usually agreed that it should be about five percent of the total word count.

There are a number of online tools to help you check the density of keywords in an article, but one of the most useful is Live Keyword Analysis. Just enter the body of the article and your keywords into the spaces provided, and click the update button. You will then be presented with the percentages for your keywords.

Choosing relevant keywords needs to be considered carefully and should reflect the words a search engine user is likely to use to find your article. By selecting relevant keywords search engines will place your article favorably in its page ranks, which in turn will increase traffic to your content. A simple rule of thumb is to consider what words you would search on to find content similar to your own article, and make these your keywords.

As well as the body of the article, another important place to include keywords is the title. The title

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>