Google loves articles! Article marketing is the way of today, and article directories are the way to make money from your website: but you must have the right keywords or you will fall flat on your face.

And why is this? Because of the emphasis Google and other search engines are not only putting on articles as web page content, but also because they are looking upon article directories as excellent sources of good content, and an article on a good directory is worth its weight in gold in terms of link popularity.

The Google algorithm uses link popularity as a measure of the relevance of your page to the keyword used by the search engine user, so having the right keyword associated with the link from the directory is a very important part of your website promotion strategy. The important term here, then, is 'keyword'.

The Importance of Keyword Research in Article Marketing

Without the right keyword, your article might never be read: at least not read by potential visitors, and when those you are not targeting reach your resource box then they will either not click on your link, or if they do your landing page will be irrelevant to them and they will just click away. Finding the right keyword is one of the best website promotion techniques available to you.

It is important in article marketing, therefore, that having decided upon the topic of your article, you find out the best keywords to use with it. You can choose keywords in three different ways:

a) The most popular, so that you have a large number of people seeking your keyword, b) The one with least supply, so that your competition is as low as possible, or c) A combination of each so that you have an average demand with as low a supply as possible.

Although most keyword courses will tell you that the third option is best, it actually depends upon what you are using the keyword for. It is absolutely correct that you should choose a keyword with maximum demand and minimum supply to use on a web page, where you are competing with every other web page on the internet providing the same type of information. However, such keywords are no longer easy to find, and although they are there if your dig deeply enough, you often have a decision to make.

Long-tail Keywords

For web page purposes it is frequently more profitable to seek a large number of what are known as 'long-tail' keywords, consisting of several words (in internet parlance a keyphrase of 5 words is nevertheless still referred to as a 'keyword'). You then design a web page for each so that you can get the bulk of search engine users of these less popular keywords to your web pages.

Doing that could bring more visitors overall than if you designed just the one page for the more popular keyword, but with lots more webpages using that keywords so that your share of the traffic would be considerably lower than for the long-tail keywords.

Article Marketing Provides two Sources of Traffic

With articles, however, you have two sources of traffic. There are the normal search eagine results that could result in your article being listed high in the SERPS. This is because the directory pages that hold your articles are themselves scanned by Google and other engines, and can themselves be listed. In such cases, you should be seeking competitive keywords, so that you have the most users but with the fewest other websites offering the same keyword.

However, the second is the article directory itself, and in spite of what you might read some trying to tell you, article directories are read by many people. Those that say nobody reads the articles on the directories are talking tosh because I can have any of my articles read by over 2000 people over the directories I submit to. 150 reads is common on Article Avenue, and I can get even more on Ezine Articles. That number is likely very conservative, and I likely have considerably more than 2000 readers from the 100 or more directories, ezines and other publications on which my articles are published.

What I am coming to is that article directories have their own search boxes that people use to find articles on their niche, and that is where you need to use the most popular keywords, and not the most competitive. In this case, it is demand that counts and not how many other web pages are using the same keyword. Website promotion involves an understanding of the medium you are using.

Article Keywords are of Two Types

So, to finish up, choose a keyword for your article that has massive demand, irrespective of supply, and another that has a good balance between supply and demand - at best lots of supply and no demand (though you won't find that it is the Nirvana).

But you get the idea: cater for both the search engine listings for your article and also the terms that the directory users will use when searching for articles. If you can optimize both by the right choice of keywords, your articel can drive masses of traffic to the web page of your choice. Improve your website promotion techniques by learning how to write articles using the right keywords and you will make the most of article marketing to your benefit.

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