Guide to Writing Articles, SEO and Backlinks

Writing articles for the Internet is different than writing for a print publication; you have to pay attention to the SEO. Here are some ideas and tips I have learned through experience and I hope they help you.

Article Ideas

There are plenty of ideas on the news everyday and all around us. Write what interests you, your knowledge or write about things that occur in your life.

You can also use the internet to find the hottest keywords of the day. One site is Google Trends. You can then write an article about a hot topic of the day or get other ideas. On your dashboard in Factoidz.com there is a list of suggested current topics to write about. You can also go to the Factoidz forums and look at questions and either write an article to answer a question or get other ideas for articles.

Article Competition - Unique Article Ideas and Titles

When you have an idea for an article, Google the idea and see how it might rank. If you want to write an article about weight loss and your title might be “How to Lose Weight”, Google it and look at the competition for the title. Google that title in quotes and you will find 1.97 million hits. Without quotes it jumps to 54 million hits. That is too much competition and you will probably never rank very high.

If you still want to write this article, you will need to find a unique idea or angle and title. If you were to have your article deal with a particular way to lose weight, then you might have something. If your angle and title would be “How to Lose Weight by Skipping Rope”, in quotes there are only 3 hits and without quotes there are 25,500 hits. You could then rank much higher in the Google search engine by narrowing your idea and title. By narrowing your idea and title within a broader idea, you can rank much higher in the search engines.

Writing Articles

It is helpful to write your articles offline using a program like Microsoft Word that has both the grammar and spelling checker. You can use an older program like Word 2000 or 2003 which can be found on eBay fairly cheap. A great free program is from OpenOffice.org. Get version 3.2 or higher since this also has a grammar checker along with the spelling checker.

Make sure you read your articles several times and if possible have someone else read your article once you have finished writing it. It is amazing how many times after reading your articles over and over and found no errors, someone else could find several.

SEO

Stands for Search Engine Optimization and is important for your articles to gain in ranking in the search engines. The higher ranking the more likely many people will find your articles. SEO can be confusing and not the easiest thing to accomplish, but with time you will get better at it. SEO encompasses the proper use of keywords known as keyword density, proper marketing of your articles and getting the right backlinks for your articles.

Keyword Density

Keyword Density is a ratio of how many times a certain keyword or keyword phrase is in your article compared to the total number of words in your article. If you were to have the keyword “car” appear 15 times in an article that had a total of 600 words, the keyword density for the word car would be 2.5%.

You have to pay attention to keyword placement and the number of keywords in your articles. Make sure there are two of your keyword and or keyword phrases in your title and if possible one in any subtitles. You should at least have some keywords in the first 200 words of your articles.

Some experts say a good density is 4%. Others say try for a density of 1% to 7%. Many agree not going over 5% is a good rule of thumb. Most of my articles have around 3% to 4% density for my two or three primary keywords or key phrases. If you go over 5% to 7% keyword density, the search engines might consider it spamming and you will not get ranked very high.

Don’t worry so much about keyword density that it ruins your articles. Just put your keywords in so that they are normal looking and fit the sentences and don’t look out of place. You can always edit your article and add or subtract the right amount of keywords. I usually write my articles first and then use a text analyzing program to see what my keyword density is for each keyword and edit if needed. I use the programs Textalyser and Keyword Analysis. Sometimes after writing your articles, the SEO editing is the hardest part.

Article Titles

Titles are what get peoples attentions and make them want to read your article, but being too clever or cute with titles can ruin your article. You want to let people know what the heck you wrote about. A good title is one that will identify the subject completely.

Make sure your title has two keywords in it and one keyword in your subtitles. You can have working titles, but always keep in mind you want two keywords in the titles. Many times after writing your article you will look at your final keyword density and come up with better titles using those 2 or 3 keyword or keyword phrases.

Backlinks

Backlinks are also known as inbound links. Putting backlinks to your articles in the right places can have a great effect on your articles ranking with the search engines. Search engines will look at the number of quality backlinks to your web page or articles. Quality means the ranking of the web site that has a backlink to your articles. Search engines will also look at the relevance of a link back to you. If you have a backlink to your fashion article from a football betting web site, this might not count for much, but if you have the backlink from a major fashion site then that would be a quality backlink and relevant backlink.

Some ways I have gotten backlinks include going to places like Yahoo Answer or Wiki Answers and looking for questions that were relevant to one of my articles. Then I would write a short answer and put a link to the appropriate factoidz article. It is important you make the link to any article relevant to the questions asked, or you could be banned for spamming.

I have also gone to other good web sites and done the same thing. You have to join in the conversation and then in the conversation you can add your comment with a link to an article. Again it has to be relevant or they could ban you. Sometimes you will get lucky and someone will make a reference to one of your articles and then link back to your article.

There are numerous backlink checkers where you can find the backlinks to your articles. What I have noticed with these is that they don’t show all of the backlinks you know of and some show different backlinks that other checkers do not show. One you can try is SEOTools Backlink Checker. Paste the URL of your article into the box.

You can also exchange or trade backlinks with other website (reciprocal backlinks) or make your own blogs adding a small paragraph and a link back to your articles.

Intra-linking is like putting backlinks to your other articles in a separate article that you write. For example when you write an article on Factoidz about tomatoes, you could also include in the article two backlinks to related articles you also wrote on Factoidz about gardening. But these intra-backlinks should be relevant in the article you write. These types of backlinks are not as valuable as the other backlinks but are still worth doing and they also get people to read your linked articles.

Social Bookmark Your Articles

Everyone has their favorite places to market their articles. Twitter is my current favorite. You Twitter your articles and then use hash tags, which will also target an audience for a specific article subject. Many people like and use Facebook. For both you need a lot of followers. Try and get followers who are in interested in the same subjects you generally write about and who would be the most likely to read your articles. Watch Twitter once in a while and retweet others comments and articles. That could get them to retweet and follow you.

When you have a number of articles under your belt, you can then watch the news or look at the hot topics of twitter. If one of your articles matches the hot topic then twitter it and make sure to use that hash tag or wording of the hot topic.

Other social bookmarks include Digg, Mixx, Diigo, StumbleUpon and Delicious just to name a few. There are too many too mention. Here is a list of the Top 20 social bookmarks. Some of these places are like your own favorites that you put online and then you make that list public for all to read, Delicious and Folkd.com are good examples of this.

I recently found a web site that automates adding your articles to social bookmark sites. It is called IMAutomator. It has a free version and a paid version. The free version lets you submit 10 articles per day. It will submit your articles automatically to 15 different social bookmark sites, which will get you good backlinks.

With web sites like Digg, Propeller and Mixx, you add your articles for all to see, and if it gets popular or you have a large following, your article could get many views. You have to be very careful not to appear to be spamming these sites, so just submit an article to these types of sites once a week or even less. On many of these sites, look at the groups and join as many as you like. When you submit articles, you can also submit them to the groups you have joined. Many of these social bookmarking sites will also give you good backlinks.

Conclusion

This all takes time to accomplish, but the backlink building takes the most time. Twitter might be the fastest way to get your articles noticed, but that might only last a short time. It would be a shame to write good articles and no one see them because of ignored SEO.

© 2010 Sam Montana

More Helpful Articles:

How to Find and Legally Use Photos in Your Articles

Best SEO Practices to Get Traffic to Your Website