Writing ezine articles is one of the top ways to drive increased traffic to your website. Three of the advantages of article marketing are:
1. It is free;
2. It is simple;
3. It is effective.
So, a technique that is free, simple and actually works. Are you waiting for a punch line telling you there’s a big drawback? Well, you can breathe easy. There is no such punch line. All you need to be an ezine article author is a reasonable knowledge of spelling and grammar, plus a willingness to spend some time researching and writing articles.
There is no mystery about article writing. Anyone who can write coherently in plain English can do it. Writing articles as a marketing tool requires one additional ingredient. To use ezine article writing successfully as a means of driving traffic to your website, you also need to know the right way to use keywords in your articles. An article without relevant keywords or with a poor keyword framework is of limited use as a promotional tool.
Here are three things to note about the use of keywords in articles:
1. Firstly, you need to choose your keywords wisely by picking keywords or phrases that get regular searches but don’t have millions of web pages already in competition for that search term.
2. Secondly, you must ensure the keywords are relevant to your landing page.
3. Finally, you must learn how to use the keywords in your articles.
One thing you must avoid is what is known as “keyword spamming”. This refers to the practice of over-use of a keyword with the intention of attracting the search engines. How does a search engine determine the author’s intention? As even Google hasn’t yet developed a way of reading minds, the search engines have to rely on mathematical ways of hunting out your secret thoughts. Life for article marketers is made a little more complicated by the fact that we are not privy to how these algorithms work. We have to operate on best guesses.
The current best guess is “less is more”. The optimum recommended keyword density is about 1% – 2%. That sounds very low. However, if you take a 500 word article comprising of four paragraphs, 1% density equates to once per paragraph and once in the title. If you are using a single word, it could seem quite natural to use it a bit more often. However, if you are writing around a five word key phrase, your article would probably read oddly if the phrase was used more than once in each paragraph.
Use synonyms to avoid excessive use of your main keyword. You can also use more than one keyword. It is far better to use one main key phrase plus a secondary phrase and keep both of them down to a density of no more than 1%.
The best way to employ your keyword is to use it in the title of your article, in the first and final paragraphs and two or three times in the rest of the body of the article (to be adjusted depending upon the word count). The most important thing is to write in a way that sounds natural.
