Article Writing - The Importance Of Keyword Research
All webmasters want to get as much free traffic to their websites as possible
. It is no secret that one of the best ways to achieve this aim is to write articles and submit them to online article directories. Properly researched and constructed articles can be a source of highly targetted website traffic.You migh be wondering how will your website traffic be increased by writing ezine articles? Writing articles works in two ways: having articles published online creates links back to your website, thereby improving your site's placement in search engine rankings, and people who read your articles and find them interesting will visit your website.
There is a little bit of science you need to use if your ezine articles are going to successfully increase traffic to your website. The science is all about the use of keywords, and the term "keyword" includes phrases consisting of several words. You can write a brilliant article but, if you choose your keywords unwisely, that article will not achieve all it might in terms of increased website traffic. The truth is that a mediocre, or even downright badly written, article with properly used keywords will work better than a good article with poor use of keywords.
Choosing keywords requires a bit of research. You need to come up with keywords that a fair number of people use to search for information, but which have not already been used by other writers in previously published articles. Finding keywords people search on is easy, finding keywords with little competition is easy; finding keywords that have both attributes is a bit harder, but it has to be done.
The point of writing ezine articles is to increase traffic to your website, so there is no point in basing your article on keywords nobody (or hardly anybody) ever searches for, but if you choose a keyword that's searched heavily, the competition will be too great. If you pick a highly popular keyword, high ranking websites will already be holding the top spots in the search engines and your article will be buried so deeply in the search results that nobody will ever see it.
Remember that "keyword" can actually mean a phrase. In fact, many of the best keywords are phrases of four words or more, and these are known as "long tail keywords". The way this works is easy to see if you type a few phrases into Wordtracker or one of the other free keyword research tools. Try typing in "dogs", then "German Shepherd", then "white German Shepherd", then "German Shepherd Training". You will see that the first search term "dogs" gets thousands of searches but the number of searches drops dramatically when you start searching under more specific terms.
Once you have a list of long tail keywords that are relevant to your website, the next step is to research the amount of competition for each keyword. The easiest way to do this is to use Google's advanced search feature and type each of your keywords in turn into the exact phrase box. This is where you will see how many websites are already listed for that keyword or phrase. It is often useful to check out the sites appearing highest in the organic search column so you can look at the competition you will be facing.
Keyword research can be quite time-consuming when you first start but, like most things, you will find you speed up with practice. It is tedious work but absolutely essential if you want to make the most of your ezine article writing. If you can find a keyword that gets a reasonable number of searches but has only a few websites listed under that term, you have a chance of getting your article listed high up in the search engines. Getting one of the top positions in the search engine results means your article will be seen by more people and an increase in the level of traffic to your website will be apparent.
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