How To Write Visitor Focussed Articles And Achieve Higher Search Engine Rankings
 by: Heath McGregor


Many website owners have cottoned on to the idea of writing SEO (search engine optimised) articles to get one way back links to their website. If the article is of high quality you are more likely to get 3rd party websites picking up your article and use the content on their site. In doing so this provides a one-way link to your website and significantly improves your own websites search engine position results.

The trick however is to write a quality article that is optimised for search engine keywords AND your readers.

The biggest mistake I see with authors is that they write for the search engines and not their visitors. The result is a short term focus on your website development (and income) because there are minimal return visitors.

Colin McDougall of VEO (visitor enhanced optimisation) in combination with Matt Cutts of Google fame talks about optimising your sites and articles for what people want and not what the search engines rank. I believe in a combination of both - as long as it is subtly optimised for the search engines.

SEO rules and algorythms change continuously as the big 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) become more sophisticated, but there are a few basics that remain the same.

Meaningful niche keywords and niche keyword phrases that identify what the article is about must be carefully selected. Find out the terms that are used within the niche that you are writing about and list all of these. Create a list of related terms and then organize according to relevance.

Usually, three keywords are used in a single article. The primary keyword should be contained in the title of the article as well as somewhere in the first sentence of the text, as close to the front of the sentence as possible. The secondary keyword must be contained in subsequent paragraphs of the text, as must the tertiary keyword or keyword phrase.

Throughout the article's text, variants of the keyword or keyword phrase can be used. For example, if you primary keyword happens to be "health" you might use the words well-being, healthiness, healthy, unhealthy, sick, ill and even healthcare are variants of the main keyword phrase. The smarter search engines will pick this up as the search engines at looking at related keywords and the use within a site.

Keyword placement is also important when learning how to write SEO and VEO articles. By using the exact keyword phrase once and then using the words of the keyword phrase separated by a few other words can increase your SEO ranking. For example, "healthcare practitioner" as a keyword phrases could also appear in the text as "healthcare providers and practitioners" and still count toward keyword density.

Optimal SEO articles usually have a keyword density of about 2-3% for the main keyword and 1.5% for the other keywords. Articles with too high in keyword density will score lower on the search engine rankings than those that meet the density optimization rules.

As your articles are ranked by search engines, you'll find that what is known as keyword spamming, packing an article full of keywords creating an abnormally high density, will result in your article failing to show up in the search results. This is to prevent people from creating nonsense articles that are just strings of keywords. This is bad for your business and bad for website users in general. It is a trend I'm seeing less and less as poorly designed websites are filtered out of the search engine listings.

By learning how to write SEO articles with a focus on your providing high quality information and value for your visitors will encourage repeat website visitors to your site, achieve higher seo rankings and ultimately a greater income.

About The Author
Heath McGregor is a small business internet marketing consultant who can help you grow your business and achieve more traffic, higher sales conversion and expand your business opportunities. To learn more about Heath and get some of his free Internet Marketing advice visit his blog http://www.heathmcgregor.com