Getting the Best Out of Articles on MiceLife
1. Clear, Focused and Readable
Above everything else, the article must make sense and be worth reading because that is what the search engines want and what your visitors want. No one wants to read badly written spam that tells them nothing.
2. Remember The Article Has Two Jobs To Do
Each article has two separate tasks. Firstly it is simply link building. A way of generating links to your website to get a better search engine placement. Secondly, the article is there to encourage readers of the article to visit and spend money on your website. Fortunately these two jobs are easy to do simultaneously if follow Rule 1.
3. Pick Your Keywords
If you haven’t picked your keywords for your web site read Step by Step Guide to Better Search Engine Placement and Picking Your Keywords before continuing.
4. Long But Not Too Long
The best articles are about 500 to 800 words long, broken down into four to five paragraphs. Search engines want lots of text focused on one topic where as human readers want quick answers. Between 500 and 800 words is the optimum length that balances the two competing needs. Have a look at the best articles listed on the Best Articles page to see how many words they have.
5. Use Your Keywords in the Title
The title of the article must contain your keywords as it is important both the search engines and human readers.
6. Once per paragraph
Each and every paragraph should contain your keywords but should do so without it being forced or resulting in bad grammar. If you are struggling to including the keywords in a paragraph, drop the whole paragraph and write it again.
7. Sub-Heading
Split every couple of paragraphs up with a sub-heading using header elements ( <H1>, <H2> <H3> …). If you can work your keywords into the sub-heading then that is a bonus but the most import job for the sub-headings is to catch the eye of a human who is skimming the article.
8. The First Link
You can include up to three links in your article. Your first link should be on the first use of your keywords in a paragraph (i.e. not a title or sub-heading). Only the keywords and no other text should be linked to your site’s home page.
Advanced Techniques
9. Double Dipping
Realistically, not many people are going to read your article. Your article may be highly focused on your keywords but it is just one article. Websites that are all about the keywords (such as you own website) will always have better search engine placement. This isn’t a problem as the job of the article is to build links not drive traffic. However you can use the article to drive traffic as well.
Pick some very minor keywords that are related to your website that get about ten searches a day and try searching in Google on those keywords. You will see that most of the sites returned do not use the exact keywords and are not optimized for them. If you use these keywords once a paragraph or even once every other paragraph then your article will quickly starting getting traffic. Of course, it will only be a trickle of visitors day, adding up to a few hundred a year but they are bonus visitors as you were writing the article anyway.
10. Circle-J*rk
If you are serious about promoting your website you will end up writing several articles so use one link in each article to link to another. Why? For the same reason you want to link to your website. Each link coming into a web page or article increases its trustworthiness which in turn increase the value of outward bound links. If your articles link to each other, they all appear more trustworthy and this increases the value of the links back to your website.