Search engine optimization has become a key component in business marketing today. If you want your website to help improve your business, it will be important to make sure the articles you write are good enough to be published anywhere online. You will also want your website to be ranked as high as possible by search engines, and in order to do so, you will need to create quality articles for many other websites.

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Features of a good article

The first step you should take when writing a good, quality article is to keep in mind that you should be informative, educational, and, above all, interesting. When people search for information, they don’t just want something that will tell them how to do it, but they also want to be entertained. Providing a list of useful information may be the easy way to meet the requirements of an assignment, but if the content is dull and boring, or if it is hard to read, not many website owners will consider that article for publishing. On the other hand, you will want to make sure the content is informative enough to reflect well on the owner. They probably already have many other well-written articles in their archives, and they probably won’t accept anything less than a professionally written article.

The second important thing to consider is the key word or phrase you use to link each article.  Obviously, you will want these words to be relevant to your site content. Whenever a potential customer searches for something related to your site, you will want them to find your link high up on the list, and to do so, you will need to know which words and phrases they will be searching for. Don’t simply try to guess what keywords will be effective. Instead, conduct some research to better understand your target customer, and use that information to insert keywords into your articles.

Common mistakes to avoid

Some businesses actually hire companies to write SEO articles for them, and they have noticed that not all articles are created equally. Publishers will avoid SEO authors who fall for these common mistakes.

1. Unoriginal content – Some SEO writers decide to simply copy and paste other works to complete articles. These writers are either uneducated on the topic or too lazy to come up with their own material. Whatever their reason, you need to make sure you do not take this easy road. If this type of material was found on your website, you would lose credibility. Any other publisher will feel the same way, and probably won’t tolerate any type of plagiarism.
2. Typing, grammatical, and spelling mistakes –Authors who do not check their work before it is published will sound uneducated to the reader, so you could lose your credibility. Anyone writing articles to improve SEO needs to take the time to check their work with a computer spell check and by reading the material themselves before the article is sent out to be published.
3. Incorrect content – Most SEO writers are not experts on the material they write about. Therefore, they are much more likely to include incorrect content in their work. Before you start any SEO writing assignment, you should make sure you are very informed on the subject matter and that your sources are reliable.

The last thing you need to remember when writing an SEO article is that this marketing strategy is simply the means to a better ranking. While each published article will help you bring potential customers to your site, this does not necessarily mean that they will buy something once they have visited. A higher ranking will provide more traffic to your website, but once they are there, it will be your job to create a website designed to sell them your product, service, or idea.

Jane Atkins is an author who writes guest posts on the topics of business, marketing, credit cards, and personal finance. Additionally, she works for a website that focuses on educating readers about credit cards for no credit.