5 Ways to Optimize your Articles for the Search Engines

Article Marketing can be a great additonal stream of traffic to your business.  The main way articles receive traffic is through the search engines, however many marketers waste their efforts by not properly optimizing their articles for the search egines.  Below are 5 steps that will take your from rookie to pro in writing articles for the search engines.

1. Use High Quality original content.
This is the essential; the search engines value orginal content.  Make sure that you run all of your articles through copyscape.com or other smiliar sites that will check the orginality of your article.

2. Include the Keyword in the Title the article
This is essential and if you do just one thing, do this.
Example) Keyword = Flat Stomach
Title = How You Can Get A Flat Stomach

3. Include the Keyword in the first 50 words
For some reason google’s spiders, what scans your webpage, seem to pay more attention to the first 50 words. As a rule of thumb it is important that you include your keyword in the first 50 words. As a side note also making sure that you have a keyword density above 1% is good practice. Keyword density is the amount of time the keyword appears in the article. For example, if you keyword appears once in a 500 word article your keyword density is said to have a Keyword Density of 2%. Don't get too caught up in keyword density, it is more important that the article reads well, and gets the reader to take action aka click the link on the resource page.

4. Include LSI words
This is advanced and not necessary, but it will help. As part of google’s algorithm it now looks at related words to determine the relevancy of the page.

Example) Keyword = Golf Clubs
LSI word = Golf Set, Golf Bag.

Luckily Google tells you what it thinks the related terms are. You can determine this by going to the Google keyword tool at adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. Check the use synonyms box and do a search. On the bottom of the results where it says additional keywords to consider,these are the LSI words.

5.Meta Keywords and Descriptions
By including your keyword in the Meta Keyword tag and Meta Description, this is a way to tell the search engines what your webpage is about. It's simple and takes a few seconds. While it is not as effective as it use to be, the search engine spiders still pay attention to it. Make sure that you balance your Meta keywords with some LSI keywords and make the description look natural.

Optimizing your articles for the search engine will give the article a better chance at receiving more views, which is the one of the goals of your articles. If you follow the 5 steps in this article your articles will be better optimized for the search engine than 99% of the articles out there, and recieve more traffic.