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Keyword Tips To Write Articles That Are Optimized

What does it mean to write articles that are optimized? Possibly, for most people using any sort of Article Marketing strategy, it refers to search engine optimization – getting higher rankings in the search engines means more traffic, which is what we all want right?
With search engines in mind, here are some keyword tips that will help you write articles that are optimized for optimal search engine rankings.
Keywords: Optimized Use & Placement
Keywords are without any doubt the single most important element to optimizing your article – from how many times you include the exact phrase and how many times you include related phrases, to specifically where you place the keyword phrases within your article.
You should aim to use your main keyword phrase in the following places:
Title, towards the beginning
First paragraph, preferably in the first sentence
Last sentence
Resource box
Headings and Sub Headings- if your article can be broken up into sections, using the keyword phrase, or very closely related phrase, in the sub headings can also boost your SEO score. This is especially true when used along with H tags.
Related / LSI Terms- Search engines are smart enough to understand that while not all terms and phrases are identical, they may still be related. A naturally written article won’t always repeat the same phrase every time, there will be variations, and these variations not only boost the relevancy of your article, but they help you avoid keyword stuffing your article.
LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing, which is a topic unto itself (and one you might want to research further), which essentially means related terms.
Format the keywords- Did you know that text format can affect the SEO ranking for a webpage? Highlighting your main phrases and related terms adds emphasis to a topic, and can make it easier on to identify the intent of the article for the reader, and the search engines can understand this.
Use Bold, Italics, and Underline on your main phrases where appropriate.
Keyword Density- Don’t use your keywords enough and you won’t rank for that term. Overuse them, and you will be penalized for keyword stuffing. I find aiming for something in the 2-3% range works best – meaning for every 100 words in your article, your main phrase should appear 2-3 times.
Again, use of related terms and phrases can be used to augment or substitute for some of these.
Keyword Anchor Text Links- Most article directories will allow at least a couple of links in the Author bio or resource box, and some will allow more sprinkled within the article body. It’s a good idea to anchor one of these links with your main keyword phrase.
Long Tail or Short Tail- Almost as old as the internet itself is the debate about should I target short or long tail phrases? The length refers to the number of words in the phrase – one or two words is considered short tail, anything more tends to be considered long tail.
Short tail phrases tend to have massive search volume, but also massive competition, so it’s harder to rank for them unless you really know what you are doing and have a lot of resources behind you.
Long tail phrases have less competition but also far less search volume. Easier to compete with by far, and also far more specific, far more targeted, generally leading to a better quality of visitor.
If you build websites, you may notice these tips are more or less the same as you would follow to build those websites – Keyword use in meta tags, title, placement on the page, etc. This is because an article is essentially a webpage, and search engines rank by page, not by website, so the same rules apply.

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