The ability to wr
ite quality and informative contents is an important step towards becoming an expert in the field of writing. However, when it comes to writing articles for submitting to paid websites, just writing a quality article is not enough since your overall monetary gains or how much money you make is purely determined by the amount of traffic your articles generate.
Basically, what I am trying to say is that, the most important thing is to know how to drive traffic to your articles.
Search engines usually rank a website based on many factors, such as the quality of the contents found on a website, keyword relevance, backlinks, page authority, page interaction time, bounce rate, type of a website and social signal.
However, since it is most likely you will be submitting your articles to high ranking websites or authority websites, it can be much easier for your articles to rank, provided you also put into consideration these two more factors that i am going to discuss.
The following two factors seem to have a significant influence on how your articles perform on search engines after submitting them to paid to submit websites;
- The Title of an Article
- The Keyword and Keyword Density
1. The Title of An Article
An Article title remains one of the most important factor in ranking any article. If you are able to come up with a good title, you are more assured of getting constant traffic flowing to your articles. What is a good title? A good title should be made of words or phrases that people are using to look for something on the web and not so many people have already written about that specific topic.
A title should be enticing enough that a reader will be tempted to click on it for more information. One way to go about selecting a good title is by checking how many people have written about a specific topic.
Simply go to search engines like Google and type the keyword of your choice. For example, if I want to write an article about “How to Run a Short Distance”. I will just type the keyword phrase on Google search engine.
From the results, you can see there are around 62,700,000 topics related to that particular keyword. To narrow my search and to be more specific, I will insert double quotes at the start and end of the keyword, so that I can be able to see how many pages are using the exact keyword phrase.
As you can see, we now only have two exact search results for that particular keyword. However, this does not guarantee you will get traffic when you write an article with this keyword, you need to find out how many people are searching for that particular keyword using the same phrases.
So, the next step is to use Google Keyword Tool to search for an exact match results or for how many people who are searching the web using that particular keyword, either locally or globally. I insert the keyword on word or phrase field, I select the local country that I want to target (for this example, USA). I want to know the exact search results, so on match type, will select exact.
From our results, you can see there is zero monthly competition, zero global and monthly searches for that particular keyword. This basically shows that no one is using that particular keyword to search on the web. Therefore, “How to Run a Short Distance” is NOT a good keyword to use as an article title.
You can now move on to other suggested keywords on the list and experiment with each one of them until you find a good keyword with less competition and high search volumes.
2. The Keyword and Keyword Density
Keyword is basically a word or phrase that is used more frequent within an article. Keyword density is how many times that specific keyword has appeared in an article.
For example, if my article on “How to Run a Short Distance” is composed of 1000 words and I have repeatedly used “How to Run a Short Distance” 20 times within the article, the keyword density would be 20/1000×100=2%. A good keyword density should be in between 2% to 5%.
You can distribute your keyword on the title, inside your article as a single keyword or phrases and if possible, at the end of an article. However, remember not to overdo your article by inserting too many keywords, which can result to your article getting penalized for keyword stuffing.
Lastly, SEO articles is an important step in ranking an article high for maximum exposure. However, it is important to remember that, your articles should be search engine friendly as well as user friendly.
Otherwise, a meaningless, low quality, stuffed with keywords articles will be of no value to a user. You can be ranking on the first search results of Google but if you are not providing anything valuable to your readers, they will not stay or come back again to your website.
