Understand The Essentials

Before you actually go out to get any writing clients, you need to understand the essentials of what you will be doing. When someone hires you to write an article, they will want you to focus on three things. A keyword or topic, keyword density and length.

Keyword or Topic

The internet doesn't run like it used to. No one just hops on a news group and tries to find something interesting. People start out on search engines like Yahoo or Google and search for what they want to see.

Whatever they type into the search engine is called a keyword. It can be a single word, like 'cancer' or it can be a string of words (a keyword phrase), like 'how can I get rid of my acne?'

The most important part of any article is the keywords that it is centered around. If your client wants people that are searching for 'how to stop a bully' to read the article that you write for them, they will tell you to write the article based on the keyword 'how to stop a bully'.

This is absolutely paramount in article writing! Every article will likely target a specific keyword or keyword phrase. Your clients will almost always supply you with one or more keywords. So, to satisfy your client, you better be including that keyword several times throughout the text. You could do this in a couple of ways. You could say,

'If your child is being hounded by the biggest kids at school, tell him these three easy methods of how to stop a bully.'

Now, the search engines will be able to recognize what your article is about. When someone searches for 'how to stop a bully', the search engine will be more likely to include what you have written in the results!

Keyword Density

Now that you understand keyword phrases, you need to know how to use them correctly. Articles must utilize appropriate keyword density. Keyword density refers to how many times your keyword appears, compared to the total number of words.

So, suppose your client has asked you to create an article based on the keyword 'automobiles' and you have written a 200 word article. If the keyword 'automobiles' appears 2 times within the article, the keyword density is 1% - since 1% of all of the word in your article are the keyword.

Traditionally, it has been said that effective articles should have a density no lower than .5% and no higher than 3%. Because of the recent changes in Google's search algorithm, I would personally suggest that you keep you keyword density between 1% and 2%. If you go too low, search engines will not be able to recognize what your article is about. If you go too high, the search engines might penalize you for trying to stuff your article full of keywords.