Article Search Engine Optimization

Article search engine optimization is is oddly enough an area that has not received a lot of embrace nor emphasis. However the rewards for optimizing your articles can benefit yourself or your company immensely. These rewards don't only give more views to your articles, they also show you how to obtain better search engine ranking for your web site; which is often times sought after by webmasters and businesses.

Article search engine optimization is rather simple, but all too often mis-understood. Several factors must be considered when trying to optimize your articles for the search engines as well as the sites that host your articles. These factors include your article keywords, article title, article structure and your link anchor text to your web site.

These are all very important things to pay attention to. Your article keywords is the first component to focus on. Determining what your article readers will be searching for to find your write up is your first thought to ponder. Then I will recommend certain internet tools to help verify what your readers are in fact searching for. Let's say for example you are writing an article about healthy cat food, and we will pretend you are a cat food reseller online. Some good possible key words that I came up with were healthy cat food diet.

Now I want to find better and more accurate results for what people are looking for. So I pointed my browser to googles keyword tool and typed in healthy cat food diet. I then arranged all the results by "Average Search Volume" and found out some interesting facts. Popular terms that are search for are diet cat food, as well as the words healthy and nutrition are searched for regularly as well. Now we can determine a better set of key words for our article. We can confidently say that our key words we want to focus on are nutrition, healthy, diet and cat food.

Later we will focus on how to benefit from these keywords we found as well by placing them throughout our article and title. Let's move forward on our article. Now we will focus on the title of our article. You must be creative with a catchy title, however your title must also include your main key words. This is because when search engines crawl your article, they are going to consider the title (which is often times placed in to the article URL) as the main point of focus in determining what you are talking about. Search engines focus on relevancy, and this is your starting point to tell the search engine what you are writing about.

Since we are using the cat food article as an example, using our key words we can now create a catchy title with great key words within it. Make sure that your title invokes interest while implementing your key words. For our example, I would recommend we use a title that is something like this: Nutrition For Your Healthy Cat, Diet Cat Food That Lengthens Your Cats Life As you can see within our title we implemented the key words nutrition, cat food, diet and healthy. This will help immensely in giving you the top rankings available for these key terms. Now we must improve our article itself so that it is relevant to your title and keywords.

Your article structure itself needs to focus on providing quality content and at least 500 words (recommended minimum - some sites require more or less words) within your article. Now we need to make sure that your keywords are included within your article itself. You must place plenty of variations of your keywords throughout your article, however you must make sure that it does not affect your article itself. Everything you write should still make sense and not sound like you are spamming the article with your keywords. It is recommended that you use each keyword at least 5 times within your article.

So for our example, you would want to use the terms Nutrition, Cat Food, Healthy and the word Diet at least 5 times throughout your article. Doing this will help the search engine confirm that your article is actually about your title and topic. The result will be that the search engine will rank you higher within their results because of your relevancy.

Without your key words within the body of your writing, you will most likely rank poorly in the search engines. Lastly is one of the most important steps if you are promoting an article on the internet for search engine optimization purposes. When you create a link to your web site within the resources area of your article (or wherever your link is allowed), you must use key words within the link itself that is pointing to your web site.

The text within a link is simply called anchor text. If you provide a link only to your web site's address, you will not reap all of the benefits that you could if you created good anchor text within your link. A great example for our article would be the following anchor text - "Find healthy diet cat food and nutrition products".

As you can see we included all of our key words in the link text and made sure the link made sense! Sometimes this is not allowed and you can only receive a link that includes your web site address.

At this point there is nothing you can do, and you will be completely fine - the search engines will still give you positive rankings regarding the article. Hopefully this will help you to write better articles with rich engine optimization in mind. Joel McLaughlin