How to Optimize Your Articles for Search Engines

High quality writing has a wide variety of words, juxtaposed in a wide variety of ways. This causes problems when you're writing for the web. The best quality writing is very search engine unfriendly. Every time you break out your thesaurus you're throwing a curve ball at the search engine, which doesn't think in synonyms. Instead search engines look for repeat instances of the same word, or variation on a word. However, if you optimize for search engines by using the same word over and over again, your writing will sound bad. Here are a few tips that will to optimize your writing efficiently, and without destroying its quality.

Check the Yahoo Buzz Index

The Yahoo Buzz Index reports what people are searching about. It shows trends in searches. It can give you an idea of what's hot, and what's not. After you check the Yahoo Buzz Index, you can also check Google to see which keywords get very few results. This would be a good topic to write about, since there's a dearth of information online about that specific topic, yet there are a lot of people searching for it. You can optimize for the specific terms people are searching for.

Take Advantage of Latent Semantic Indexing

Many search engines now use latent semantic indexing, which searches on different variations of a term. For example, if you're looking up "optimize search engine" on Google, the search engine will also turn up "search engine optimization."

For example, I recently wrote an article on healthy baking. I had difficulty getting the instance of the term "healthy" over the 1% mark, in relation to the other keywords in my writing. That's because it's often unnatural to keep repeating the same word over and over again. Instead, you'll normally see a few instances of "healthy" and a few of "healthier" and "healthiest" and "health." Since engines like Google use latent semantic indexing, my article is more likely to come up high on a list of results in which "healthy" was a keyword.

Use Omniture's Keyword Selector Tool

Omniture's Keyword Selector Tool is an invaluable tool for optimizing your keywords. If you don't know which terms are really being searched, you may optimize for keywords that nobody's searching on. But you don't want to optimize for keywords which too many people are searching on. You'll never have a chance.

You can look to see which keywords and keyword combinations are really being searched. Also, try to optimize for terms which are getting fewer searches. Those keywords offer less competition, and will get you more page views than the top ranked searches.

Continue to narrow down your keywords, focusing on things that people generally have trouble finding online. Switch keywords to get better results. Choose more specific keywords, and avoid generalities. For example, phrases such as "low fat brownie recipe" are far more targeted than "healthy baking," and will get you more traffic.

Use the Textalyser Tool

The Textalyser Tool will tell you which keywords you've used most often, and how they rank. This will show as a percentage of your total article. Use the Omniture Keyword selector tool to determine which keywords are being searched, then use the Textalyser tool to determine how high they rank in your article. Optimizing over 5% could be considered as spam by the search engines. However, anything below 1% probably won't be noticed. So try and keep your desired keywords between 1 and 5%. You can also examine your first page, as opposed to your whole article. If you find that any keyword on your first page is creeping over 5%, replace it with a synonym in a couple of places.

Use the TagCrowd Tool

The TagCrowd Tool is somewhat better than the Textalyser tool in some ways. It creates a visual tag cloud of your article. It groups similar words the way most search engines do. So it will treat paint, painter and painting as the same keyword group, whereas the Textalyser tool will treat each of these words as separate. The TagCrowd Tool gives you a graphic representation of which keywords in your article are most prominent. If one keyword is dominating the article, you may want to reduce it within the article. If a keyword you need to get traffic ranks too low, you should try to find another opportunity to use that keyword in the article.

Optimize Your Title

The title of your article is actually more important than the main text. Make sure that the important keywords are not only in your title, but are also at the beginning of your article. This is because search engines rank earlier words in your title higher. Also, if you write for a site which converts your article title to a URL, this will also affect your overall traffic.

Optimize Keywords at the Beginning of the Text

You need to make sure the beginning of your article contains a few instances of your keywords. If the keywords don't appear until further down the page, you won't rank as high on search engines. This is more important than filling your article with incredible numbers of a keyword or keyword phrase.

Optimize Using Subheaders

Subheaders are a great way to repeat a keyword which doesn't fit anywhere else. Your writing will still be as readable as if it had not been optimized.

Optimize Using Tags

A properly tagged article can help people find you. Tags are not visible to browsers, but do come up in searches. Tags will not remedy a poorly optimized text, but they will increase your traffic.

Scan Your Article for Keyword Optimization Opportunities

Never write for search engines. Instead, write your article the way you feel it should be written. Then, after you finish, scan the text to see which important keywords seem to feature prominently in your writing.

Inevitably, you will always see places where a keyword could have been used, but was left out. For example, in my article about healthy baking, I found a few places where I'd written the word "wheat" but had left out the word "whole." However, there were several places where "whole" simply didn't belong. I only placed the word "whole" where it really made sense.

If you look at every one of your articles in this manner prior to upload, you will notice a lot of these missed opportunities. Try to group keywords together in patterns you know are searched. For example I wrote an article on The Best Fourth of July Fireworks in Dallas, Texas. I tried to use both Dallas and Texas together whenever possible. I also used the keywords free, fireworks and fourth prominently. This article generated an enormous amount of traffic in the few days before the fireworks extravaganzas in my area took place, because it used a grouping of highly targeted keywords that people tend to search on before the fourth of July.

Be careful to optimize only the right words. If you find that a certain keyword or keyword combination won't get you traffic, don't bother with it. Switch it to a different keyword combination. For example, when I was writing an article about How to Sell Your House Quickly, I checked the Omniture Keyword Selector Tool, which showed me that more people were searching on Sell Your House Fast. So I changed my title to this, and optimized my text for fast rather than quickly. I also tried to use the keyword house more than home. But when house started getting a little too dominant, I replaced it with some different keywords.

Trim

After you've finished writing, trim the deadwood from your article. You may want to get in the habit of letting your articles sit on the computer for a couple of days before you submit them. This way, you'll have a fresh perspective when you look at it again. You'll see more clearly where you could have been more concise. In many cases, you can increase the incidence of a keyword simply by making the text smaller in relation to that keyword.

Write on a Site with High Traffic

More than once I've copied and pasted the same article from one site to another, almost verbatim. On the initial site, the article got no traffic. Almost the exact same text on a higher traffic site got several hundred views in a few months. So in some ways it doesn't matter how well you optimize for keywords. If you're on the wrong site, nobody will see your writing.

Optimize Your Associated Content Producer Page

If you write for Associated Content, you can optimize your Producer Page. Do this by writing a lot of articles on a single topic. Your page will be more likely to come up in a search for that specific topic, especially on the AC search engine.

Don't Over-Optimize

The most important factor in keeping the quality of your writing high is not to overdo the optimization. In many cases, search engine optimization won't do any good. In other cases, despite minimal search engine optimization, an article will take off with thousands of page views. Also, every once in a while, you should write an article that is not optimized for search engines at all. These articles should be written to show off your best writing skills. Try to write on a variety of different subjects, and promote your writing on other sites. That way your best writing won't get lost in the shuffle.