Sunday 14 March 2010

How to Use Keywords in Articles

Using keywords effectively in articles is likely to result in a webpage that earns money. This means researching into finding the best keywords, synonyms and other search phrases that people are actually using. Without effective use of keywords and their strategic placement within the text, the article could remain invisible in search results.

Best Use of Keywords in Article Writing

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Most webmasters know that keywords play an important role in getting traffic to a website or webpage. The same applies to writing articles. The writer must conduct research into which search terms people are using to ensure the article comes up in search results, and therefore get traffic. Using Google’s Adwords keyword tool is invaluable for this end, not only in finding the most common search terms people are using, but also in finding which keywords attract the highest revenue, as well as ideas for synonyms, not conceived by the article writer.

How to Write an Article that Makes Money

Writing highly-focused articles on a niche subject will fare well for the writer. Once the topic has been chosen, it is a good idea to write the article for the reader, not for Googlebots. This makes the article more pleasurable to read, and also improve the likelihood of the article earning backlinks from other sites.

Drafting an Article for Money Making Websites

Once the first draft of the article has been completed, the article writer may edit and mould the article for SEO in the following ways:
  • The nature of reading from a screen is different to reading a book. For this reason, it is best to confine the article to between 400 and 600 words long.
  • Break up long paragraphs and pepper with bullet points to make the article easier to scan by the reader
  • Attach a few images to the article and tag the image with keyword rich search terms which will make the article more visible to search engines
How to Use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Conducting keyword research using Google’s Adwords keyword tool is invaluable for webpage optimisation. This requires the following procedures:

The article writer will not know which search terms people are using when writing the article, so I personally write the article without this in mind in the first draft. Once I have completed the article I go into Google’s Adwords Search Word Tool, and I guess the search terms people might be using to find my article.

Google’s tool will come back with useful data for the webwriter. This will include:
  • The actual search phrases people are using, including spelling errors
  • Search volume of each search phrase
  • Synonyms to the search phrases given
  • Which search keywords attract the highest revenue.
  • Seasonal trends, for instance, Christmas related articles will show peaks in search results in the autumn months and dips in the summer
  • Geographical trends, for instance, local results and global results
  • Advertising competition for a particular topic. Some very niche topics may have little advertising competition, in which case, Google may display non contextual ads alongside an article to fill Adwords space
By clicking on a selected column header, the tool will sort the search phrases into any order the writer wishes, for instance, to show the search terms that attract the highest revenue, or by clicking another column, to sort the search terms in the order of traffic volume.

Low Competition Keywords

With the keywords given, the writer may research which keywords have too much competition, or in other words, if too many websites are using them. This can be done by opening Google’s search page and capturing the key phrase in speech marks and seeing how many other websites are using them. If more than 50,000 results come back, the keyword might not be good for SEO, as using high competition keywords could bury the article within other similarly worded articles. Finding low competition keywords can be done by a system known as the money word matrix, covered in another article within this blog.

Make Money by Writing Articles

The writer may jot down strong keywords given from the Google toolbar and sprinkle the article with them. Strongest keywords should be placed in the article title and subtitle. The opening 50 pages is also a good place, as well as the concluding paragraph. Other good places are image tags, anchor text for links and in bullet points.

Once the article has been completed, it is a good idea to read it back so that it is not obvious to the reader that it is keyword rich. But be careful not to put too many keywords in the article. This is known as “keyword stuffing,” and could cause the article to suffer in ranking.

3 comments:

  1. Hi,
    What a well-organized blog. Love your posts and the good info. Yes, writers have to do more than know how to use keywords--because of saturation levels, now writers have to look at the competition levels, too.

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  2. Kind of you to say so. sorry I have been away for a while, having been writing on other sites. Am planning to make more installments here soon.

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