How to Write a Searchable Article: An Exercise

Writing content for the World Wide Web is a little challenging for many authors. With emphasis on searchable content, keywords and keyword phrases have to be incorporated in the article for it to be found by the search spiders. These search spiders or crawlers wander through cyber space reading everything. The data the spiders find is the fuel that powers the search engines. Content that is searchable, improves website search ratings, driving more traffic to the websites. For some writers, the transition from type on paper, to pixels on a screen, is harder than it should be.

Tools of the content trade:

Text analyzers well, analyze text. They replicated the job the spiders perform to let writers evaluate their work. The analyzers report on the keywords, keyword density, keyword phrase, total word count etc. The reports analyzers generate can be huge, but the main information writers need to use is the word frequency, phrase frequency, word density (in percentage) and the top 10 most frequently used words in the content analyzed.

Keyword suggestion tools provide keyword suggestions based on a list of key words. This tool compares each keyword list with search rankings and suggests words based on common search phrases containing the keywords listed. Most of the recommended keyword phrases reported will not be relevant to the keywords submitted for suggestion.

Exercise to improve search results of content:

Take an average article and run it through the text analyzer. In the report, the top 10 most frequently used words will be near the top, followed by two or more word phrases used frequently in the article. The density of each will be listed on the same page. Don't worry about the density at this point. Copy the keywords and phrases and save for later.

Next, take the relevant keywords from the report and use the suggestion tool to run a report. The report should list quite a few of two or more word common searches phrases and how often they were used. The higher the search numbers the better the word or phrase. Pick out the higher rated words and phrases that relate well to the article topic. Make note that there is often many good words suggested that are not included in the keywords submitted for suggestion.

Take the new list of keywords/phrases and rewrite the article with these suggestions in mind. Don't stick the suggestions into the article, start from scratch with a full rewrite. This will make the revised article flow much better in most cases. Then run the revision through the text analyzer.

Compare the two reports and the two articles. You should see an improvement in the reports. The keywords list and the multi-word phrases should be much more relevant to the article topic. You should also notice that the relevant keywords in the top 10 list have increased. When comparing the two articles, the revised should have equal or better flow.

Finally, repeat the process using the most relevant keywords and key phrases in the second text analyzer report. When making the second revision using any new relevant keywords/phrases suggested, pay closer attention to de-emphasizing the not so relevant keywords in the second report.

In the third text analysis report, you should see a huge improvement in keyword relevance as compared to the first. Now is the time to check the density of the keywords. The ideal density depends upon the site, but a good rule of thumb is four percent for single keywords and 1.5 to 2 percent for phrases. A range of 2 to 6 percent for the keywords in an article is a good target. That range as stated, depends on the site. The search spiders look at the whole page not just your article.

Most writers using this exercise will find that keyword density falls right inline for the final revision. The use of the suggested keywords often improves the readability of the article. This is not practice an author has to use every time he writes an article; it is just an exercise for writers wishing to improve content search-ability.

After completing the exercise, an author can use the suggestion tool to research a topic. Run the likely key words for the topic for suggestions. Next, run the suggested relevant keywords and phrases through the tool again. With the final list of suggestions in mind, writing a searchable article is much easier.