Choose Articles Wisely

You can add articles all day long, but make sure the content is geared to target your particular audience. The articles should be informational and useful to your audience. They should carry the sole purpose of getting your potential customers to act. The articles should lead your readers throughout your site. Readers should never be confused about your website's purpose when they arrive.

When deciding on what to write, choose topics that would interest your readers and entice them to click and learn more about the subject. For example, let's say you are selling fine gold jewelry on your website. You might include an article titled "How to Clean Fine Gold Jewelry." The article can promote interest to those who own fine gold jewelry, or who want to learn about the care of jewelry before buying. Either way, the readers have bought gold jewelry in the past or are thinking of buying now. Therefore, this article would be conveniently targeted for your website.

A poor example of this would be to include an article about prescription drugs on your fine jewelry website. This might bring a lot of traffic, but the visitors will not be at all interested in fine gold jewelry. As you can see, the purpose of adding content is not just to "get listed" in the search engines, it's to get listed under the proper keywords in the search engines that are related to your business.

Lead with Your Articles

When adding content articles to your web pages, be sure to design each page so that it leads the reader to a point of action. Place a link to your sales presentation or product pages just underneath the article title and at the conclusion of the article. You might even include a link and call to action somewhere in the middle of the article. Once the reader reaches your content article page via a search engine or some other promotional source, they should be able to maneuver quickly to find what they're seeking. Have the navigation menu of your site clearly visible on all article pages if your goal is to sell a product or service.

Include Keyword-Rich Titles

Articles should have keyword-rich headlines that grab the reader's attention. The headlines should be concise and contain the main keywords for your subject. Look up "long tail keywords" for great resources on this subject. Long tail keywords are words that are more specific to a subject. With general keywords, it can be very difficult to get good positioning in the search engines due to steep competition. With more specific terms or phrases, your site will have a much better chance of getting listed in the top results. There is usually less traffic with long tail words, but the traffic is targeted.

Examples:

General keyword: buy jewelry

Long tail keyword: buy fine gold jewelry

General keyword: gold earrings

Long tail keyword: gold earrings with white pearls

General keyword: gold necklace

Long tail keyword: long rope style gold necklace

Sprinkle the targeted long tail and general keywords throughout your article several times and also include the keywords in other areas of your article’s web page if possible, such as in the logo "alt text" or within text link phrases.

Using articles along with these few easy marketing steps will make search engine friendly content pages that get noticed.