2. Check Keyword Traffic: As in, select those keywords that produce a decent amount of traffic in your niche. The last three words are italicized because you should always choose keywords that will drive relevant traffic to your site.

Getting back to traffic, don’t shoot for the top keywords in your niche – unless your niche is so small that it can be easily achieved. I’ve found that targeting numerous keyword phrases that get a decent amount of traffic in my niche is better than shooting for the most popular keywords in my niche because it brings a broader base of traffic.

I refer to this is the shotgun spray of SEO, rather than the laser shot. Why? For example, my niche is freelance writing. Rather than trying to optimize for popular phrases like “freelance writing jobs” and “editing jobs”, I optimize for less popular keyword phrases like “seo copywriting jobs,” “newsletter writers,” “article writers,” etc.

The rationale behind this is that when people search for something on the internet, the more specific they are in their choice of keyword phrase, the more serious they are about purchasing.

Think about it, if you already knew you wanted to be a freelance writer, but you really want to focus on being an SEO writer, you might search phrases like “seo writing jobs,” “article writing jobs,” and “seo copywriter jobs.”

Remember, choosing less popular keyword phrases may drive less traffic, but will drive more targeted traffic. This is maximizing your article marketing efforts.

3. Check Popular Articles: One thing I’ve started to do recently in my article marketing efforts is to check the number of page views of articles in my niche. I will go to a popular article marketing directory, do a cursory glance of 15, 20 or 25 articles and see if any jump out at me as getting a lot of reads.

If so, I’ll then write an article around that subject for my site. Remember, no idea under the sun is new, but all of our experiences are. All you’re doing is putting your spin on the article topic.  It goes without saying but never, ever plagiarize the work of others. Not only will it eventually be discovered, it can ruin your reputation on the web – even if you do it just one time.

Article marketing is about dispensing relevant information to a targeted niche. Do this – in conjunction with a little behind-the-scenes SEO work – and you’ll be well on your way to driving continuous traffic to your site.

“How long should an article be that I write to submit to article marketing directories?” I receive this question a lot. The following is my take given my experience working with many internet marketing firms.

Most articles submitted to article directories fall in the range of 350-500 words. Some may be 600-750 words long, but these are the exceptions.

Therefore, if you’re trying to achieve a keyword density of between 3-5% (which is somewhat of an industry-accepted standard) then you need to repeat your keyword phrase at least 10 times in a 500-word article, for example. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, just a measuring stick to be aware of as you’re writing.

The Importance of Organic Search in Article Marketing

Finally, not to get into too much depth here, but natural search (aka organic search) is starting to be just as important as keywords in search engine optimization. So for example, if your site is about freelance writing and you have a lot of content that is not “keyword rich” but is about freelance writing in general, your site may still rank high when surfers type in certain keywords that have to do with freelance writing. Why is this?

Because your site has been identified by search engines as an authority on that subject based on its overall content. No one knows the algorithms of search engines and how/why they return the results they do, but backlinks, navigational structure, type and breadth of content, etc. all tell search engines something about your site.

As you can see, knowing just a little about SEO can go a long way towards helping you to get the most out of your article marketing efforts.