If you want a website that brings in the search engines AND keeps visitors on your website, you need to have information that is relevant, informative and well written. However, when using methods that are designed to attract search engines, the content still needs to be keyword-rich. How can you keep content keyword rich and still be of value to the visitor?

1. Write articles that are helpful, but not too long

The more words you can say something on the better. Keep articles short (400-800 words) or the search engines may not ‘read’ all the way through. Creating many articles and optimizing the content in the article will allow you to target more keywords than if you try to cram them all onto one article.

Content such an artice, is useful for creating traffic, pleasing the search engines and offering valuable information to your visitors.

2. Write articles that are relevant to your business or website

Keeping to a theme when writing your articles, will help your website both with the search engines and visitors. Keyword-rich articles will likely be relevant or you wouldn’t choose them. If you are allowing others to post your articles on their sites, the tighter the focus of the subject of your articles, the better your site will rank in the search engines for specific keywords.

3. Write articles that are informative

Getting traffic is not valuable to you if people leave your site right away. Providing informative content will keep visitors on your site longer, and is also important to ‘smarter’ search engines which also pick up on the content.

If your articles are made up of keywords and phrases strung together, the search engine may discount it. There are grammatical rules that some search engines may use as a basis for weeding out optimized sites from the truly informative sites.

Obviously the search engines won’t really know if the content is of any value to your visitors – only you can know that – but if you are taking the time to sit and write editorial for your website, you’d do well to make it of value to the reader.

4. Make your articles unique

The algorithms are constantly changing, but currently it has been stated that the search engines don’t like duplicate content. That is why many affiliate businesses that set up new websites for each member are often unable to make a top showing in the search engine results becasue of too many of the same website.

Writing your own articles or hiring a ghost writer to write them for you will work better. Using 'free to reprint' articles may work, depending on the amount of times that work has been reprinted. In every case, do not duplicate the webpage of another site – both for ethical reasons and the fact that it will not bode well for your search engine status.

If you are using a template site you will need to change a significant amount of the information in order to create a site that the search engines will consider as unique. You can do this by changing your web page title, meta tags, introducing paragraph and by inserting links or editorial blocks within the article body.

Unique content is also important to visitors who may be viewing other related websites and are looking for fresh information on the topic. By providing unique content you will stand out from the crowd.

5. Write articles that are rich in keywords

Keywords are very important to search engines. The words you think that people looking for your information or product might use in the search engines are called ‘keywords’. The search engine acts like a Yellow Pages phone book. People look up a topic by word or phrase and find the related entries listed.

Your traffic will depend largely on if you choose the right words. If you use words that no one is searching for – or words that are highly competitive – your chances of being found through the search engines goes down dramatically.

One way to find the right keywords is to find out what words are most popular for searches. Using a word harvester or a Keyword Selector Tool will allow you to find out approximately how many searches have been made for your selected keywords. You may find some similar words or phrases that have even higher amounts of searches than your first selection.

The key to finding the best words for your content is to use the most general term first and then find more specific words or phrases that relate to your website. For example; if you are looking for words for a children’s education site, you might first look up the words ‘children’ or ‘education’ to discover the most searched term related to your topic. Perhaps you’ll see ‘child education’ or ‘teaching children’ are more commonly searched terms than ‘children’s education’.

When you’ve found words or phrases that are commonly searched for you can find details on the competition for these words in the PPC area by using the View Bids Tool, also in the Overture Resource Center. If the word has high bids or many bidders you can consider that the competition will also be high in the natural search engine results. Check it out for yourself. If the natural search is bringing up sites that lack appropriate content you may be able to top them with your own keyword-rich content.

Tags: articles - content - web - writing - keywords