There are certain sets of skills and knowledge that are a part of any job to be completed properly. This pertains to writing for article marketing as much as it is for any profession.
In another article I’ll offer some of the specific skill sets involved in professional article writing. I want to concentrate this article, in fairly broad terms, on the necessary knowledge sets.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is at the heart of any article marketing. I’m sure you recognize that SEO is a very complex notion, and it changes frequently as the search engines are continually refining their algorithms to try to deliver ever improving results for users. However, if we are only considering the task of the writer, we can narrow the list of specific aspects of search engine optimization to just a few.
Use of Keywords: Sometimes one hears very specific recommendation about, for example, how often a keyword should be used in an article. One person might say, “You must use your keyword between 5% and 8% of the time.” However, there is no consistent statistical evidence that gives us any magic percentate. With a broad stroke, I can offer some basic guidelines, but do not consider them rules that must be followed in every situation. 1) It is helpful for the keyword, or at least part of a long tail key phrase, to be included in the article title. 2) It is best if the keyword appears in the first paragraph of the article. The second paragraph is the deepest into the article you should go before the keyword or key phrase should make its first appearance in the article’s body. 3) You should avoid using any keyword more that ten percent of the time in the article. 4) You should not ever try to use an article to search engine optimize for more than three variations of a keyword.
Content Duplication: Make certain that your articles are sufficiently different from each other, if you are assigned to write more that one article for the same keyword or short keyword list. Otherwise search engines may see them as the same content. When that occurs, one one of the articles will remain in the search engine’s index. When a search engine considers two articles to be the same, it will only index one of the articles. It may take a while for the search robot to recognize the similarity, especially if the duplication appears on different sites, but eventually one of more of the major search engines will consider one of the articles as redundant information and only list the other in any results. At a website, dupecop.com, there is a free tool available that will compare up to four articles to score the uniqueness of each against the others. The same site offers a version of the software for use on your own desktop that will compare up to twenty-five articles simultaneously. It is priced very reasonably, and I use mine on an almost daily basis.
A good article marketing writer should also be familiar with a concept called article spinning and useful software for article marketing, in addition to being mindful of search engine optimization guidelines. Article spinning is nothing more than providing alternative words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs throughout the article. The software’s function is to randomly select from the available alternatives. While the process of preparing an article for spinning is quite time consuming, it is a highly effective way of generating unique versions of the same article. In the end, it is faster than writing more articles.