Increase your website’s SEO by writing articles

First, write an original website subject-related article of at least 300 words. Article writing is a great way to create one-way links back to your site on high PageRank pages that have subject and keyword similarity to your own site.  Hence, article writing creates great SEO (Search Engine Optimization.)

Things to do when writing an article: 

• Have an attention-grabbing title.
• Make sure that there are keywords and/or key phrases in the article.  The latter should be done in a way so as not to alienate the reader because of keyword stuffing. Read the article written without the thought of adding keywords and then add a couple if needed.
• Cite references and sources.  Example: John Killertop, in his book The Art of Article Writing, mentioned “the main mistake article writers do often is not proofread their articles before submitting them.”
• Proofread before submitting, check grammar and spelling.

Things not to do when writing an article: 

• Copy text from your website. The latter will create a duplicate content penalty in the search engines and cause more damage than good. http://www.copyscape.com/ is a great tool for checking webpage originality in regards to SEO.
• Do not submit the article to more than one article site.

Submit the article to sites like http://www.goarticles.com/, http://www.technorati.com/, http://www.squiddo.com/, http://www.ezinearticles.com/ when you are satisfied with the content therein. The article can go on your own site if you don’t plan on using it on an article submission site. The 300-word base amount is a good rule to follow when writing a blog post.

Some article submission sites make use of the rel=”nofollow” tag in their source code.  The latter method causes the submitted article not to have the SEO value that it could have without the use of the html tag.  The URL http://www.vretoolbar.com/articles/directories.php actually lets you know if the article submission site uses “nofollow (NF)” and/or if you have to pay to submit.

Notes:  There is a “Word Count” option in the ”Tools” menu of Microsoft Word or Works if you need to know how many words are contained within an article.  Do not forget to put a link back to your site when you fill out the author information box.