Article content is crucial to drawing your audience,
particularly with those niche markets hungry for specialized
information. Just as critical as content, however, is making
certain your articles are search engine optimized (SEO).
Search engines have a decade and a half of increasingly
sophisticated technology behind the way they find and rank
web pages. In the very earliest days of the text-based web,
there were few enough pages that ranking wasn't really
important, and the search engines in use at that time –
Archie, Veronica, Jughead – indexed only websites that were
submitted directly to them. When HTML was invented and
the first web browser using this rich and easy-to-use
language came about, the number of web pages online
began to increase exponentially.
Soon, it was necessary to have a search engine like Lycos,
which went out and looked for websites by itself. Search
engine technology grew rapidly, overcoming wave after
wave of attempt to take advantage of them through various
schemes. Today's search engines use sophisticated textbased
algorithms that look at a variety of things on and off
your web page to determine where to rank it in relevance
when someone searches for specific terms.
How Search Engines Work Now
Every search engine works a little differently, but they all
search for keywords, metaterms, and links to your site.
Keywords are terms that are used frequently in the text of
your document, and generally correlate directly with the
words someone searches for. For instance, if you search for
"dogs," the keyword your search engine relates to that is
"dogs." Some search engines are smart enough to use
synonyms (so "canines" and "collies" would also be looked
at), but you can't count on this.
Obviously, there are hundreds of thousands of pages that
would love to get your "dog" traffic, so search engines get a
little more complex. They also look at the frequency and
distribution of that keyword in your web page. Is it common
at the top, but less so at the bottom? Do you use the term in
your headers, your page title, your subheaders, and your
metaterms (the hidden keyword sections in the HTML header
of your page)? A complex algorithm puts all this information
together and rates your page for relevance.
It also looks for spam. If you use the term "dog" as every
other word, then clearly your page is not going to add a lot
of value. If you use the term "dog" frequently in your
metaterms but not once in the body of your text, search
engines are going to rank your page down, or not at all. And
your words must show some sort of grammatical structure.
Next, search engines look outside your page. Do you have a
lot of people linking to you using the term "dog" in the link
text? If you do, this is a huge boost.
What makes all this a challenge is the exact formulas search
engines use is a closely guarded secret. And every search
engine runs its searches in a slightly different way.
How You Can Use Articles To Get Traffic
Understanding how search engines work is a critical first
step to optimizing your articles for search engines. Ensure,
first, that the articles you have are good articles that add
value to your website and are easy to read and understand.
It won't do your business any good to get all the viewers in
the world who read your articles, get bored, and move on.
After this, start optimizing. Make certain your keyword is
present frequently in the headers and subheaders of your
article; and use the H1-H6 hypertext header markup, not
bolding and font size changes, to denote headers. Try to
ensure that you have a 3-7% rate of appearance of your
keyword in your article; the more often the keyword
appears, the more likely the article will rate highly. Don't
overdo it to the point that you ruin your article.
Optimize the search engine text in your page: the page title
and the metatags. Make sure your keywords appear in these
critical sections.
Finally, try to encourage linking to your articles using your
keywords. You can do this by exchanging links with other
webmasters, or you can submit your articles to article
directories, where other webmasters may download them for
free in exchange for retaining a resource box containing
your name, your site, and a URL link set up the way you
want it to appear – ideally, with the keywords appearing in
the link. It's better if you use articles different from the ones
on your site, but equally good quality to draw more
webmasters to use them.