Most people can write a 400-500 word article about their business without too much trouble. It’s even fairly easy to write several of these on different issues that are relevant to their target customers. And it’s pretty simple to get them published on several article directories. But are you getting the most out of each and every one that you write? Are you getting the maximum return on your time invested? Probably not!
You need to follow 3 steps to make sure that every article you write provides you with the maximum return on your investment. The return that you’re looking for is more traffic to your website and more leads for your business. If you follow these three steps you will be sure to get the most traffic and most leads from every article you write.
#1 – Keyword Density is “Key”
How often you use each keyword that you’re targeting in your articles directly affects the amount of traffic you get to your website. There’s an ideal percentage of keywords you should have to get to the top of the search rankings (both on the article directory itself and in the search engines). If you have too many keywords per number of words you will be penalized. If you don’t have enough you won’t come up for your targeted keywords when they are searched.
So what is the percentage? Well it’s actually debatable, but the most accepted range for keywords is 2-3% of the total number of words in the article. By utilizing this keyword density range you will surely drive more traffic to your website and generate more leads for your business.
#2 – Article Posting
Once you have an optimally keyword dense article you need to make sure that it is posted everywhere that it can possibly be posted! There is, however, one thing to keep in mind: Duplicate Content Filters. Duplicate content filters can destroy the effect your articles have on driving traffic to your website. In fact, if you’re not careful they can destroy your search engine rankings and nullify your online lead generation efforts!
A duplicate content filter is something the search engines use to be sure you’re actually providing valuable content, rather than just producing page after page of identical content just to get your search engine ranking higher. The search engines want to see different, and therefore more valuable, content on your sites and on sites linked to yours before they reward you by placing you high in the search engine rankings.
To avoid being penalized by the duplicate content filters you must altar your articles when placing them on any of your websites, blogs or pages. You must change it by about 40% to be sure you’re clear of the duplicate content filters. Or you can just wait until the content is already indexed in the search engines (takes about 3 days) before re-posting your article somewhere else. This will advance your search engine ranking as long as you don’t have two blogs or pages linked together with the exact same content.
The more sites you post your article on without triggering the duplicate content filter, the more opportunities you have to multiply that content and create more website traffic and generate more leads.
#3 – Indexing Your Articles
The fastest way to spread your article all over the internet is to ‘bookmark’ it. Website traffic is directly determined by exposure so you need the most exposure possible. Now that you have a keyword optimized article, posted it on highly trafficked sites and avoided duplicate content filters, you need to index it with “social bookmarking”.
An example of a social bookmarking site is digg.com. There are many great traffic generating sites like this one, and they are all very easy to use. You simply create an account and submit the URL of any new page, post or article. You can submit the article directory link of your article, your blog, your HUB, Wiki, Lens, or anywhere else you may have posted it. Every unique URL with your content on it provides another opportunity to multiply your lead generation exposure.
To be clear, when I say ‘multiply your lead generation exposure’ I mean “Multiply”! You can submit each unique link to several, or even all, of the bookmarking sites. So literally every page you create can produce 10, 20, 30 times the exposure just by indexing your article on bookmarking sites.
For a tool to easily determine the keyword density in your articles go to http://live-keyword-analysis.com/.
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