Article writing can be a very powerful marketing strategy for any business; however on the internet, everything revolves around search engines. That means that if you’re going to be writing articles for use online, you need to be optimizing them for search engines. To help you do this, I’m going to give you 5 quick keys for SEO article writing.

1. Determine the Keyword

The whole point of search engine optimization is that you optimize your content for good placement by the search engines for one keyword. Seldom can you rank a single piece of content well for multiple keywords, and quite frankly, if you’re trying to achieve this you’re likely wasting a lot of time. Instead, pick a single search term and write your article around that keyword, using it as a topic.

Whole courses have been written on keyword research, but to simplify it a bit, go to the Google Keyword tool, and type in your broad topic; we’ll use “dog training” as an example. The results that come up are all individual searches related to dog training. As you can see, “dog training” is a very broad term, and actually has over a million searches per month. For SEO article writing, we want to focus on the long tail keywords – keywords with more than three words in them. Pick a long tail keyword with decent traffic (at least 500 searches per month) to use for your article.

Keep in mind, if you pick a keyword with tons of traffic, you’re also likely going to have tons of competition.

2. Keyword Density

For good SEO article writing, your articles should be between 300 and 500 words. Any shorter, and it’s not enough to really get noticed by the search engines, and any longer is unnecessary effort. The key is to use your keyword with the proper density. Now the exact density to use has been a hotly debated topic amongs SEO experts, nevertheless, most agree that 1 to 2% density is ideal.

In English, that means that for every 100 words in your article, you need to use your keyword 1 or two times. In a 300 word article, you’re probably going to mention your keyword four or five times. If you don’t use it enough, the search engines don’t think it is relevant to that keyword. Use it too much, and they consider it spammy.

Most importantly, use it in a way that makes sense to your reader, so that the overall flow of the article still works. Writing SEO articles is the art of creating content that is not only relevant for search engines, but highly useful for humans as well.

3. Title

Search engines put special emphasis on the title of your content, so you need to make sure you include your keyword somehow in the title. I’ve titled this post “5 Keys to SEO Article Writing”- that is a trick you can use on your articles too: simply add “3 Steps to…” or “7 Keys to…” and then tag on your keyword.

Whatever you do, make sure the keyword gets into the title. It really is important.

4. Keywords

Every article you submit has keywords or tags along with it. You need to make sure that the keywords you use here are relevant to your article. Don’t put a keyword in there unless you’ve actually used it in the article. SEO article writing must be relevant (Google’s favorite word), and throwing in phrases you haven’t used isn’t usually very relevant.

A quick trick you can do is type in your targeted long tail keyword in the Google keyword tool, and see what the top related keywords are. Pick two or three, use them once or twice in your article, then include them in the keywords or tags section of your article.

5. Links

Linking is probably the most overlooked aspect of SEO article writing, but the simple fact is that everything Google does functions off links. Therefore, if you really want to have a highly search optimized article, you need to get some links to it, preferably with your keyword as the anchor text.

You can do this by linking from other articles, from blogs, social bookmarks, or any of the other link building tactics. As soon as Google starts seeing links going to your article, they start seeing it as being more important, and thus start to rank it a little better.

For more information on how to write SEO articles, and how to write an article in 10 minutes, check out 10MinuteArticles.com.