Driving Traffic: Great Article Writing Techniques

Posted by Dean Lodge on October 13, 2008, filed in: Article Writing, Blogging

There are many ways to drive traffic to your website. These many ways are divided into two types: pay for traffic and free, organic traffic. Both have their advantages, it just depends on the situation. As far is longevity is concerned however, the organic traffic is the way to go. Results are not as quick to generate as pay for traffic, but organic traffic can bring traffic to your web site for weeks, months, even years to come. We will look at organic traffic techniques, specifically article writing.

Article writing can be a very powerful tool. Search engines love article directory websites partly because you are offering up content to the masses. Dry, empty websites are pretty much ignored by search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. The more content you have, the more valuable you look to the search engines and the higher in the ranks you will climb. More articles means more potential traffic. Some people recommend writing at least 1 article a day – even up to 5-10 a day. If you contribute regular, relevant and content-rich articles, you can climb higher in the search engines.

Each article you write needs to be focused around a keyword, even better is a long tail keyword. Articles should range from 250 to 1000 words. Spelling is extremely important – it says a lot about a writer if it is full of spelling and grammatical errors. Keep in mind, if you can get your point across in 255 words, don’t bore the reader by fluffing it out to make it 750! If you lose their attention at any point, then you have wasted their time and more importantly yours. Articles don’t have to be overly technical. You want to leave them wanting to read more, and that is where your website comes in. So don’t give away the farm leaving them with no reason to click through. Keyword placement is very important. In the past, article writers plastered the keywords throughout, making it almost unreadable. The spiders and search engines have become wary of this and dismiss such blatant usage. Essentially you want to get your keyword include in about 4-5 places throughout the article (title to conclusion).

There are basically 5 parts that make up a great article.

Title: Many times the title can make or break you. If you do not have something that will catch the attention of the reader, they are going to skip right over. You need to include your keyword in the title, closer to the beginning of the title if possible.
Introduction: Let them know what you are going to include in the article. You want to include your keyword somewhere near the beginning of the introduction.
Body: Your body will include a number of smaller paragraphs related to your topic and keyword. You can put your keyword in a couple of times throughout the body, just don’t go overboard. It is important to keep things simple and understandable – don’t get all fancy with big words and technical mumbo-jumbo. Keeping it basic and to the point is going to hold your reader longer and saves them having to pull out a dictionary every other sentence. The content needs to be accurate. If you leave the impression you don’t know what you are talking about, that will come through and the reader will be off to another person’s article. Information should be relevant and of value to the reader – give them something to hold on to.
Conclusion: Again, include your keyword in the conclusion. The closer you can place your keyword near the end, the better when getting crawled. Include a call to action – this is your chance to give them a reason to click on your link. You want to leave them wanting more information.
Signature: At the end of the article, you have an opportunity to include a signature file. You can include calls to action with a link to your site – lately this is about the only place article sites will allow you to have a link. You have got them all primed up with a great article and now they want to get more information from you. Don’t leave them hanging. This is your chance to make some money!

Following these basic guidelines will get you started to great article writing. To get ideas for article writing and structure, browse the thousands of articles on the many article directories on the web. Many great articles are bringing in substantial traffic to the writers website where in turn they have the opportunity to make money. You have the tools, now get out there and write!