Great copy is, arguably, the primary way for your website to move straight up the ranks and land in the spot of honor. How do you produce the type of article which everyone wants to read, while filling it with the best search engine optimization? Such a balance can be difficult, but not impossible, and the rewards are well worth the effort. Once you’ve designed your website for detail and visual appeal as well as ease of use, the next critical step is filling it with highly targeted, extremely interesting, superior quality copy on a consistent basis. Unfortunately, too many websites have a great design, but once a visitor begins reading, their interest goes out the window.

The Goal of Your Website Articles
The copy on your page must grab your readers and pull them, then once you’ve gained their undivided attention your article must inform, entertain, educate, offer a solution to a specific problem, and convince your visitor to purchase your product or service. Pretty tall order, right? Well, take a deep breath and get ready to learn how to deliver consistently high-quality articles to your readers time and time again.

Get to Know Your Audience
You should know your audience the same way you know your best friend, meaning you must be aware of their likes and dislikes, must know what they want when they come to your site and must know the best delivery system to capture their attention. Who is your target audience? What does that audience typically read, and what do you have to offer them that nobody else can do quite as well?

You want to make your visitors feel good in the same way you would want to make your best friend feel good. Care about your readers, and take the time necessary to present crisp, interesting articles which simply flow from one sentence to another. Remember—although you want to entice your readers to take advantage of what your website is offering you don’t want to bombard them with high-pressure sales.

Make Your Website Usable
If you’ve done your research you are well aware that people read web pages in an entirely different manner than they read a book. We tend to scan web pages, hitting the highlights and looking at the paragraph headers to determine whether or not we want to continue reading. Highlighted words are a good way to draw the eye, but avoid overuse. Hypertext links are one form of highlighting, while changing typeface and color are others.

Your sub-headings should be meaningful, and give your reader a good idea what they have to look forward to. Bulleted lists are a good way to get your reader’s attention, and one writing style you might try is the inverted pyramid style in which you start your article with the conclusion. Keep your articles about half the length of the normal written page in order to hold their attention until the very end.

Know Why You Write
This may seem pretty obvious, but many times articles are written simply to throw out some necessary keywords or stay with the goal of three articles per week, or something similar. If you write passionately about a subject you feel strongly about, it will shine through in your finished article. Give your readers the details, and show them why those details matter. If you really don’t care about your subject, it will shine through, and if you are bored your readers will be bored as well. Write honestly, and be willing to bare your soul when it matters.

It’s all in the Details
When you begin writing, let your beginning paragraph concisely declare what your piece is about, then organize what follows through the use of an outline. Your high school English teacher taught you about outlines for a reason—they work! Keep your reader relaxed as you expand on your subject, and explain your arguments in relatively short paragraphs. Offer concrete examples and personal experiences to back up each of your points.

People love to hear how others faced a problem and solved it successfully. Highlight the advantages of your product or services, but don’t overdo it. Give your readers plenty of resource information by telling them where they can get more information on the subject you are talking about. Finally, step away from your article for a bit, then come back, re-read, and proof one more time. Mistakes can make you look unprofessional, and alienate your readers.

While article marketing is not particularly complex, it does require two things—patience and persistence. The impact of a single article may never be particularly huge—although there are exceptions to this rule—therefore it’s the sheer quantity of quality articles you get out there along with the backlinks you receive back to your site. It’s important to look at the overall process of writing articles on a regular basis as a major campaign to slowly but surely bring in huge amounts of web traffic. Article marketing is an SEO strategy which has been around for years, but has remained a solid, trusted manner to drive traffic to your site and generate highly relevant one way links.

What Makes Up a Great Article?

Every article you write must be highly keyword-focused as well as being highly readable. If your reader is not convinced they should read through the article to the end, they will be unlikely to reach the resource box with your link. Before you begin writing, have a clearly defined goal for what you intend to accomplish. Think seriously about the image and brand you are building, and develop a message which revolves around your stated goals.

Make a comprehensive outline of your proposed article, making sure there is a clearly delineated beginning, middle and end. When you are outlining your article, think about what you want to leave your reader with, as well as the idea of leaving them anxious to read more or your articles, ensuring they will follow your link back to your site. Generally speaking, choose one particular keyword to focus on in each article, and use this keyword or keyword phrase in your article’s title, in the first paragraph once or twice and in the link text in your resource box.

What Does Article Marketing Accomplish?

When you are engaging in article marketing you are promoting yourself as a respected expert who can provide serious and innovative solutions and insights for problems which real people experience and need help with. When those same articles are also highly keyword focused your site’s link popularity can literally soar. When you use article marketing to generate revenue and increase traffic, more and more people will see your articles leading more clicks to your site.

Developing Contextual Links within Your Article

Embedded links within the articles you have targeted for article marketing gives them much more cache’ with the search engines while also establishing a good fan base for your site and your articles. In fact, you can create a huge group of people who adore your writing simply by promoting those articles which have many resources to offer to the reader. People who truly love your writing will begin to post your link on social media and bookmarking sites. Contextual links are, literally, links from your content. You gain back links by using targeted keywords, related hyperlinks or anchor text. Contextual linking requires high quality links and high quality content.

Some tips to help you develop good contextual links include taking care to check the page rank of any blog or site prior to accepting a link, and being cautious on the specific keyword phrases you choose. Getting a link from a top ranked page can greatly help your site, and developing strong contextual link building strategies through bookmarking and social media sites is also beneficial.

Article marketing can do more for your website than virtually any other single SEO technique, so it’s important to learn the specific techniques and incorporate them into your overall plan.