Traffic Tip #2
Write articles for humans – and the search engines secondarily
Presented by Charles L Harmon
Article Marketing Tip
Many people think that in order to rank highly in the search engines they need to stuff their keyword(s) in their article an excessive amount of times. This is definitely not the best way to attract readers or get traffic to your website.
How would you like to read an article filled with a particular word or phrase so many times it makes your eyes water? Well although that’s being facetious, you don’t want to load an article up with way too many times your keyword appears.
The search engines have been getting smarter. They know when you’re trying to game or pull one over on them. They won’t stand for it once they know. They could easily penalize you by moving your listing to page 500 of their index or just as bad or even worse remove you from their index.
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.
Personally I think 5% is too high. I try to keep my keyword in an article down to slightly more than 1% and rarely ever go to 2%. It makes for easier and faster writing and is definitely more readable and less likely for a reader to think you are writing for some other purpose than for them to read it.
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. Too many occurrences of a keyword is not natural in most cases and it makes reading an article rather unnatural.
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. If in question, I would error on the side of making an article interesting and informative for human readers.
