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The Importance of SEO Article Writing

The web is littered with articles that are not worth the word processor they were written on.  After a second glance, you will notice that they are horribly composed and stuffed with keywords, immediately recognizing that they were written for the sole purpose of trying to boost the ranking of a particular web page.  This is not a bad thing, just the wrong approach.  When incorporating articles into your SEO campaign, there are three things you need to focus on:

1. Providing valuable information.

2. Increasing link popularity.

3. Increasing search engine rankings.

All of this is difficult accomplish when your articles are badly written and stuffed with keywords.

The Power of Articles

So why would you want to consider articles for enhancing your SEO efforts?  Well, although having optimized content on your site is very effective in the eyes of the search engine, you must also make sure that content serves a purpose for your visitors as well.  Many of the successful search engine marketing gurus agree with this and stress the importance of delivering useful information.  If the content on your website is not helpful or useful in any way, visitors will have little motivation in reading it to learn more about what you have to offer.  Sure, you may be able to get a higher ranking in Google and possibly even bring in considerably more traffic.  Unfortunately, if visitors simply take one look at your articles and then leave, those high rankings you achieved in the search engines would mean noting at all.

Articles also make a great way to establish link popularity.  However, if you plan to distribute them across the web and have not taken the time to make sure they have an acceptable level of quality, it is very unlikely that someone else will want to publish your article on their site.   Point blank – if your articles are poorly written and do not give useful information to the reader, they will be very ineffective at helping your build good links.

Writing Articles for Search Engines

Once you have a handle on writing good content that makes sense and delivers solid information, you can then embark on producing articles for SEO.  Keep in mind that writing for the search engines calls for a good balance so there are a few things you want to avoid.

- Never sacrifice the reader experience just to achieve higher rankings.

- Never repeat the same words and phrases to the point of extreme.

- Never overstuff keywords into text because it is more likely to backfire.

The Keys to Success

You will have a much better chance of succeeding with SEO article writing by establishing some discipline within yourself.  This can be as simple as studying your niche and coming to understand your target audience.  Once you have done this, keep your articles specifically focused on their needs or interest.  Also pay attention to your content and make sure it contains concrete knowledge that is useful to the reader.  If you can accept that your audience should come before the search engines, you will be become a better article writer and everything else will fall in place from there.

Seven Innovative Approaches to Link Building

Establishing link popularity can be very time consuming, especially when it comes to sending out requests.  However, this is a critically important aspect of SEO and something that must be done if you truly want to maximize your potential.  While you never want to just sit back and do nothing, asking people to link up with you is not always the best idea.  Instead of spending time asking for links, sometimes it pays to think outside the box and use more innovative approaches to reach your goals.  Here are a few tips that will make your link building campaign much easier:

1. Get Active - You can learn a lot by playing an active role in the online forums and groups relative to your niche.  If you become popular in these communities, people will seek your advice and want to link to you.

2. Article Submission – One of the most effective ways to create quality links is publishing articles on a large variety of websites.  This could be information sites, social media sites, ezines or even article directories.  Try to focus on sites that service your market, make yourself familiar with the type of content that is published, and modify the style of your articles accordingly.

3. Publish a Newsletter – You can also use a newsletter to build good links to your website.  You can encourage readers to link by letting them know if they enjoyed the newsletter, they can link to the permanent version of the content located on your site.  Do forget to include the URL.

4. Publish Great Content – This is not necessarily new, however it works just as well as any of them.  By publishing great content on your website, people will be more likely to want to link to you.  Great content is well written and most importantly, delivers excellent value to your visitors.

5. Award Sites - An innovative way to get yourself some quality links is to submit your website to award sites. You would be delighted at the number of people who have had success with this method.

6. Get in Good with Online Directories - There are several online directories that accept volunteer editors.  This will allow you to submit your own personalized reviews of many sites, as well as your own. This also gives you the chance to better understand your market.

Nine Must-Have SEO Tools

Keyword implementation, optimal page design, link building and other SEO aspects can result in a lot of hard work.  Thankfully, there are many tools available to help you simplify the process.  Here are nine we consider must-have:

1) Thumbshots Rankings

Thumbshots Ranking offers an informative, yet fun way to make yourself familiar with search engines and learn how to optimize your site for better ranking.  Proper use of this tool can go a long way in generating the quality traffic you seek.

2.) SEOBench

This particular SEO tool analyzes results from Google and Yahoo, identifies what they have in common, and them provides a graphical display of the results in both engines.  SEOBench gives you a nice illustration which reveals that while optimizing your site for both Google and Yahoo is not necessarily an easy task, it is not impossible either.

3.) Link Appeal

Link Appeal is a very effective tool that calculates the efficiency rating of having a link on a given URL.  It relies on factors such as the number of outbound links, its page rank and the overall percentage of links to HTML.  Link Appeal can serve as a great tool for helping you decide whether to request a link on a particular web page or not.

4.) Link Popularity Checker

The Link Popularity Checker is pretty self explanatory as it informs you on how many sites are linked to your own.  We think you will find this tool quite valuable being that link popularity is such an integral part of the entire optimization process.  The more popular your site becomes, the better it will rank in the SERPs.

5.) SEO Checker

SEO Checker is an ideal tool for checking up on search engine saturation, which simply describes the number of pages a search engine indexes for a given website.  While every search engine does not report this information, a fair share of them do, and this is enough to establish a few meaningful benchmarks for your SEM campaign.

6.) Google PageRank Report

Google PageRank Report is something you can use to automatically check the ranking value for any URL you specify in the provided form.  To get the best results, simple add “www” in front of the domain in question.

7.) Link Value

This easy to use link calculator calculates the link value of your website on a monthly basis.  The value is calculated based on many essential factors specific to most of the major search engines.

8.) Keyword Research

Keyword Research is a tool that can be used to research your targeted keywords and phrases, helping you determine which as best suited to implement into your web pages.  All if you have to do is enter a given term or phrase, and the tool automatically makes additional suggestions regarding other words and phrases you should think about targeting.

9.) Google Keyword Suggestions – This handy Google orientated tool will aid you in the process of selecting popular and relevant terms that are related to your desired keyword.  Simply enter a word, and the tool queries data from a number of Google searches, which it then uses to determine the most relevant terms used by websites in that particular niche.