Legal Writing

The KISS Guide To Writing Keyword Rich Articles

By Sharon

Freelance writers are often asked to write keyword rich web content articles. If you don’t know where to begin, here’s the ‘keep it simple’ guide to get you started.

Finding Keywords

In most cases, clients supply the keywords you need for an article. If they don’t, then your first step is to research some appropriate keywords for their topic. There are several tools you can use to do this. Some of my favorites are:

the SEOBook Keyword Tool

Keyword Discovery search tool

Google Adwords search tool

These free tools allow you to search for a term and see related keywords. For each term, the sites indicate the search volume. This tells you which keywords are popular and gives you a list of phrases and alternative phrases to use when writing articles.

Keyword Density

Once you have the keywords, then it’s time to start writing. Sometimes clients ask for a specific keyword density, such as 3%. Although this is not the best way to write keyword articles, if that’s what the client asks for, that’s what you have to provide. Two tools which work well for checking keyword density are Textalyser and Live Keyword Analysis. in both cases, you paste your text into a box, hit a button and find out your keyword density. (Alternatively, you can work out how many times you need to mention the keyword phrase to achieve your target density and find and count them manually in your word processing program.)

Seeding The Keywords

It’s much rarer now for writing clients to request a high keyword density. Using keywords 10-15 times in a short article can make it virtually unreadable, so most go for using keywords around five times. Whichever method you use, key positions for keyword placement are at the start (first words, first sentence or first paragraph) and end  (last words, last sentence or last paragraph) of the article. Then the other keywords are sprinkled around in the middle.

Breaking It Up

One issue that writers sometimes face is having unwieldy keywords that don’t fit well within a sentence. Some clients are sticklers for using keywords as written, which can result in strange sentence constructions that lack the appropriate punctuation. (Example: When buying mortgages UK consumers need to be aware of interest rates.) However, others realise that search engines take little account of punctuation and stop words (short words such as ‘the’, ‘a’ and so on) and that it’s ok to use these to make a phrase more reader friendly. With this kind of client, it’s easy to produce engaging and informative articles that still meet the client’s brief.

The KISS Guide To Writing Keyword Rich Articles

Full post as published by Daily Writing Tips on July 18, 2008 (boomark / email).