What Every Article Ghost Writer Should Know About Keywords

One of the challenges to being an article ghost writer is weaving keywords into your articles without making them difficult to read. This can be a major challenge, especially when a client gives you a keyword phrase. For example, “how to get back my ex” is a little tricky to work into an article. But if a client requests it, you’ve got to deliver a good finished article and not a story. Here are some things you should know about keywords and how to use them.
Do We Even Need Keywords?
There’s a growing trend away from emphasizing keywords. Increasingly, internet marketers are finding that it’s the value of the content they write that gets traffic which will convert. They’re starting to shy away from strict keyword guidelines and let writers use them naturally.
However, keywords are still necessary and this is the reason why. An article or site will not rank highly in Google or other search engines if it is not keyword-optimized. If we skip them entirely, the search engines won’t even find our articles, and that won’t even get them read.
How Much Is Enough?
How many times should you use them? This is the whole elusive science of internet marketing, and nobody knows exactly. Google and other search engines have their secret algorithms, which are closely guarded. Not only that, they change them periodically so that marketers get thrown off the trail.
Most clients will ask you to use the keywords a certain number of times. For example, they may say to use it 5-8 times in the article body. Too little and it won’t rank; too much and it will be thrown out as spam. Other clients will give you a certain keyword density, represented as a percentage. A density of, for example, 2% means that you should use it 10 times out of every 200 words, or to make it simpler, once every twenty words. I bet you never thought crunching numbers was part of being an article ghost writer!
Luckily, densities and keyword counts are not being used as often. Most internet marketers are finding that once in the title, once in the first paragraph, and naturally throughout is enough. If it’s used like this, and the content is really good, interesting, readable and eye-catching, you’ll get the traffic you need. However, it’s really important for writers to understand how this works, so that they’ll know exactly what to do when offered a job.