How to Make Your Writing Sound Natural: A Writer's Guide to Natural-Sounding Keywords in Articles

When writing about an article topic that you're not familiar with, your writing can often sound stiff and unnatural-especially if you're trying to incorporate specific keywords or phrases assigned by your editor or websites such as Associated Content. Sure, Associated Content and other online article websites may not catch the stiff feeling of your article, but your readers will notice! This writer's workshop article will teach you how to make your writing sound natural so that you not just attract new readers, but retain those readers, too.

Let's look at an example. Let's say you're assigned a topic such as "Hawaii tourism destinations" and your editor wants you to use those keywords repeatedly in the article to achieve a high search engine ranking. If you keep typing "Hawaii tourism destinations" in your article, it will sound forced and unnatural. Plus, your readers will notice what you're doing and will get annoyed. Is there a way around this? Yes.

To begin, it's clear: When you use Google Keywords to find related topics to your article subject, the resulting keywords and phrases will sound far from what you'd naturally use. However, just because Google Keywords generates unnatural-sounding keywords and phrases doesn't mean you should ditch this tool altogether. Google Keywords can be a fantastic way to generate new ideas and break writer's block, as well as help you find what topics are unique and attract a lot of searches.

If you want to keep using Google Keywords but still want to sound natural when inserting those keywords or phrases into your website, don't give up. To begin with, you need to understand the way that search engines such as Google work. A search engine spider pulls up the words in your online articles, but ignores punctuation as well as "filler" words such as "the" and "an." Thus, you can use punctuation and such filler words to make your Google Keywords-generated phrases and keywords sound more natural.

Go back to our first example topic and see how this works. If your topic is "Hawaii tourism destinations" and your editor wants you to include those keywords repeatedly, you can't simply repeat the phrase. However, if you insert punctuation and "filler" words, you will meet the keyword requirements while still sounding like a natural, seasoned writer. You could type "Many people visit Hawaii. Tourism destinations such as Hawaii..." If you notice, the words "Hawaii tourism destinations" are all there, just broken up into two sentences to look more natural to the reader. However, search engines will ignore the period punctuation and read it simply as "Hawaii Tourism destinations."

Don't forget to spice up your writing with action verbs, hooks and other ways to grab your readers. I detail those in my article on Four Writing Tips to Make a Boring Topic Interesting. Happy writing!