If you want to write lots of articles so that your website starts to compete for decent quality keywords, one of the greatest stumbling blocks you will encounter is how to think up new tips to write about. It is not always straightforward! You can rewrite old ideas in new ways, let’s say turning a discussion into regularly asked questions list, and question and answer article, a how to article and further. But getting those initial tips is still the key.

The first place to start is to describe your services and maybe write a FAQ style article on questions you are often asked. After that, start looking at your website visitors stats. Are people searching on terms that you can write an article about? Not just is this giving you the basic tips, but if you publish a copy to your own site and then get backlinks on the same keywords, you are helping more people to find you with the same terms. Next, take a look through your article stats and see what search terms people are using to find your articles. This works the same way as your own traffic stats – find what people are looking for and give them exactly what they want to read around.

Then, look at a few of your published articles. On websites for instance EzineArticles, they will offer links to the most read articles at the end of each article. This immediately gives you clues as to what people are reading and wanting to read and shows you a few hints as to where to go next. Depending on where you are publishing your articles to and what your reason for article writing is, you might want to use a variety of different linking methods, as follows.

If you want to receive traffic from the site that you are publishing your articles to, then you want to appeal to them, not make them feel you are abusing the article. In this case, it is generally best to use one link to your site, with the link and anchor text being your web site address, including the HTTP:// part. Typically you might also insert a second link. In this case you can work this one for SEO. Probably give the anchor text as the keywords of the article title and point it to a relevant page of your web site.

Some writers are writing just for SEO and their niche or location mean that stacks of traffic from the article directory is going to be totally irrellevant. In this case, make best use of both of the links that you are given by providing each with different keywords and pointing at different pages on the web site. I do not believe that there is any advantage in having one article pointing twice to the same page as just giving one link.

Written by Keith Lunt, supplier of website design Merseyside. Call in for additional website design articles talk!

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