Article Marketing – How to Optimize Your Article Before Publishing It

If you want to attract the maximum amount of visitors to your articles, optimize them for the search engines before publishing the content.

Why optimize?

Search engines use keywords within your content to index your articles. When publishing optimized articles on your web site, blog, ezines or article directories they attract traffic from people searching on those keywords.

Top 7 Tips for How to Optimize Your Article

1. Create a list of keywords to use in your article

This is to provide a wide selection of keywords as not all will produce search results. Also try keyword phrases as single keywords tend to be too general.

2. Do your keyword research

Enter each of your keywords in WordTracker to find out how many searches that keyword gets each month. If it it gets none or only a few searches remove it from your list or use it to supplement your content.

3. Include the keyword in your title

The title of your article is often what search engines will spider first particularly if it’s the title meta tag of a web page or an H1 tag (content heading). Always place your most important keyword at the beginning of your title (as I’ve done for this article).

4. Weave the keyword into your content

Your keywords should be part of the natural flow of your content. Don’t overdo it so it sounds strange to your readers. Test your content by reading it aloud to yourself or another person. Use synonyms (similar meaning words) to supplement your main keywords.

Instead of focusing on how many keywords you should place in your article, just write naturally using them occasionally. Remember, you are writing primarily for your readers, not just the search engines.

5. Include the keyword in your anchor text

Anchor text is the text included in a hyperlink. Search engines give more weight to anchor text than the url such as domain.com.

6. Include the keyword in your resource box

The resource box is your call to action. Include the keyword in the anchor text of the link going to your web site.

7. Include the keyword in your backlinks

Backlinks are web sites that link to your web site or articles. The quantity and quality of backlinks you have determines the ranking of your web site. Obtaining backlinks to the articles on your web site will boost your site’s rankings. If you exchange links with another web site owner, make sure you provide the exact anchor text code to place on their web site.

Now every time you write an article be sure to include these top 7 tips. Your articles will be search engine friendly resulting in attracting more visitors to your web site.

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Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW)
owner and author of Maryland Web Design