aWebBiz Internet Marketing Blog

There are many article directories, but not all of them are worth your time.

Since you’re trying to get traffic to your website, you want to find the very best ones. It can be hard to choose since the search engine’s “love” for these directories seems to change all the time. Still, there are a few that you can always count on.

These include:

• www.EzineArticles.com
• www.GoArticles.com
• www.ArticleCity.com
• www.AssociatedContent.com
• www.IdeaMarketers.com
• www.Buzzle.com
• www.ArticleManiac.com
• www.Article-Idea.com
• www.Amazines.com
• www.WebArticles.com
• www.ArticleDashboard.com
• www.ArticlesBase.com

If you open an account at these different directories and start a regular submission schedule, you’ll find that you start getting visitors to your website.

Since these are people who are looking for exactly what you’re offering, your conversions should be great as well.

There are many people who think that in order to rank highly in search engines, they need to stuff their keyword in their article an excessive amount of times. This is definitely not the best way to attract readers or get traffic to your website.

The search engines are also getting smarter and they know when you’re trying to game them.

It is much better to weave your keywords in more naturally. This will serve both the search engines and your readers. There is no set keyword density that works well, but many experts suggest you stick to around 2 to 5%. That means for every hundred words you would include the keyword about 2 to 5 times.

Remember — the search engines can tell if you’re trying to stuff your keyword in your article. Their main goal is to provide a good user experience for people who use their search engine, and your main goal is to get people to your website.

It makes sense, then, that you would strive to provide good content that the search engines will like and that people find useful when they visit your website.

By Barry Stein

One of the most important things you can do to make sure your articles do well is keyword research.

Since people use keywords to search for information in the search engines like Google, you’ll want to target appropriate keywords if you wish to show up at the top of the results pages.

You can find relevant keywords in many different ways, but the easiest way is to use Word Tracker’s research tool.

You can find it at: www.freekeywords.wordtracker.com

Simply type in a keyword for your website and Word Tracker will give you many keyword ideas.

Example: If you’ve got a website about pet recipes, you would enter terms like “cooking pet food”, “homemade pet food”, “natural pet food’, “cook dog food”, etc.

Try to use keyword phrase that conatain two or three words. Single keywords are too broad and too general.

Word Tracker also gives you the numbers that tell you how often people search for each term. That way you know the keywords you’re targeting are worth your efforts.

Another important piece of the puzzle is figuring out how much competition there is for each keyword. If you are targeting words that have too much competition it’s going to be harder for you to reach the top of the search engine results pages.

Don’t worry about that happening, because it’s easy to figure out how much competition there is.

Simply go to Google and type in your keyword surrounded by quote marks. The results that pop up are the other sites that are specifically targeting that term.

Example: When I search for “Pet recipes” I see there are 184,000 web pages that are listed for that term. I would say that any keyword term that has less than one million pages in a Google search results is a worthwhile targeting.

Now that you have these keywords you can use them to give you a basis for your articles.

It’s easiest to choose one keyword phrase per article and focus the topic around that keyword phrase.

And remember to put the same keyword term in your title as well.

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Barry Stein is the owner of aWebBiz.com where he offers cutting-edge tips on all aspects of business and a Free Newsletter on Internet Marketing.  To find more advice, tools and resources to help you succeed in your business, visit: www.aWebBiz.com

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