What You Should Know to Become an Article Marketing Writer

No matter what your job, you can identify a set of skills and a set of knowledge that are prerequisites for performing the job well. This is as true of writing for the purpose of article marketing as it is for a neurosurgeon.

I’ll leave the particular skill sets necessary for someone who offers professional article writing for marketing purposes for another time. In this short piece, I want to describe in general terms what such a writer needs to know.

At the heart of the purpose of article marketing is search engine optimization (SEO). I’m sure you recognize that SEO is a very complex notion, and it changes frequently as the search engines are continually refining their algorithms to try to deliver ever improving results for users. However, if we are only considering the task of the writer, we can narrow the list of specific aspects of search engine optimization to just a few.

Keyword Use: Nobody can tell you a true magic number of times a keyword should be used in an article. If someone tells you that you must include a keyword four to six percent of the time, that person is simply wrong. (Of course, if that person is your client, it may be advisable to pretend that she or he is correct.) But here are a few generalizations about keyword use that work: 1) It is helpful for the keyword, or at least part of a long tail key phrase, to be included in the article title. 2) It is best if the keyword appears in the first paragraph of the article. The second paragraph is the deepest into the article you should go before the keyword or key phrase should make its first appearance in the article’s body. 3) You should avoid using any keyword more that ten percent of the time in the article. 4) You should not ever try to use an article to search engine optimize for more than three variations of a keyword.

Duplication of Content: If you are contracted to write multiple articles pertaining to the same keyword or small keyword list, you must make sure that the articles are sufficiently unique that the search engines will recognize them as different content. When a search engine considers two articles to be the same, it will only index one of the articles. It may take a while for the search robot to recognize the similarity, especially if the duplication appears on different sites, but eventually one of more of the major search engines will consider one of the articles as redundant information and only list the other in any results. There is a free tool that can be used to check the level of uniqueness among up to four articles at a time. You can find and use it at dupecop.com. They also sell a version of the same software that can check up to twenty five articles at a time, as long as they are in .txt format.

In addition to that limited understanding of SEO, a good article marketing writer should also be familiar with a concept called article spinning. Content spinning is simply providing alternatives for segments of the article. The segments might be individual words, phrases, sentences or even complete paragraphs. After the multiple variations are written and coded correctly, they are then fed into article marketing software that randomly selects from the various alternatives. The software is called a spinner.