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In one of my previous article I wrote on "How to Write an Article". In that article I mentioned some key points to write a good content article that will keep your readers reading. Now having understood on that, I would like to talk about how you can optimize your article to increase traffic to your site as well as increase potential readers when they search for an article.

Writers need to understand that a good content article must go hand in hand with a search engine friendly article. The following pointers are some keys to optimize your article which is important if you want your article to be search engine friendly.

3 Steps to optimize your article:

1. Firstly, you need to choose on a relevant topic to write on. You want your article to relate to your website. For example, if your website is about "dogs" then you can write an article which talks about "dog training" or even "dog nutrition". This way, it shows your understanding on that topic which eventually makes the reader want to know more about other related topics. The reader will then click on your link which is available in the resource box. This is what you want the reader to do, click on your website link! Traffic is generated this way. This one important part you need to do to optimize your article - Relate your article to your website!

2. The next thing that you need to know is the importance of keywords. Very often writers overlooked on the need to research for good keywords. Search engines has a unique way of searching through its database, it is base on textual information and will only show results based on the density of keywords in your website or article.

When writing an article, always remember to identify your keywords. You need to include the keywords in your title, description or summary and spread it through out your article. To optimize your article even further, try creating your own keyword anchor text links in the resource box that back link to the page that you want to show up in the results. As a gauge, make sure that the density of your keyword is about 3% - 5% of your article.

3. After you finish writing your article, search for the best 10 article directories to submit. If you want to be on the safe side selected 20 article directories to submit. Try to submit your article to directories that are popular as you want your article to be view by as many viewers as possible. Besides that you need to submit your article consistently to all your short listed article directories to ensure a gradual result in the next few weeks.

These are the 3 steps that you would like to take to optimize your article to the fullest. Your job is still not done yet! After your submission, do a reflection on your submitted article. Check the popularity of your article, read the comments of the reader and improve on it if necessary. To add to that, do a search and see if you are able to find your articles, if you can't, work on your keywords! Be patient and do your article submission consistently and you will see your results soon.

Source: http://www.articlecircle.com/ - Free Articles Directory

About the Author

Terry Tay is a Internet Marketer. He is with a team of successful online entrepreneurs who are experiencing exponential growth in their online home businesses. Find out more on how you can ride on for FREE at http://www.Success-eBusiness.com

By. Sandra Lightowler

Studies have shown that e-mail is the most popular Internet application, followed by search. With the profusion of websites that deal with the similar topic, the competition to get to the top of search engine ranking is very intense. After all, the higher your website is ranked the more traffic you are likely to get; and higher traffic ultimately translates to higher income.

The techniques used for achieving high search engine ranking are called search engine optimization, more commonly known as SEO. Because SEO is still in its infancy, there is still a lot of trial and error in finding the perfect strategy. There are however, a few techniques that are popularly used by website owners to help enhance search visibility and achieve a higher search ranking for their websites.

Here a few factors to take into consideration when deciding on a strategy to improve your search engine ranking:

1. All major search engines including Google have their own different search algorithms for ranking web pages. It is almost impossible to get to know what these secret algorithms are and even if you did, it would be impossible to satisfy them all.

2. Do a fair bit of research before choosing your keywords. Using the keywords as your major competitors may be an exercise in futility as they obviously have more resources and have already established themselves. Employ tools such as Wordtracker which is excellent for helping with keyword research.

3. Focusing on increasing your traffic is more financially rewarding than working to simply increasing your search engine rankings. You may succeed in getting a higher ranking with some ambiguous keyword, but that definitely does not guarantee traffic.

4. Don't get taken in by SEO firms that offer to submit your site to different search engines. Search engines have their own spiders that crawl the internet, following different links that take them from one site to the next. They do not require any site to be submitted.

5. Remember that what counts with links is that they should be from related sites. Getting links from sites that are not related to yours are detrimental to your site ranking and should not be sought after.

6. Avoid seeking links from Link farms. Cottoning on to the fact that several websites were using link farms to increase the number of links to their site, major search engines now penalise those websites that get large number of links using artificial means.

7. Create your content for your users. Developing gateway pages that are crammed with keywords is sure to have a detrimental effect on the quality of your content. And content that does not meet certain standards is not going to entice your readers to come back for more.

8. Text links fare better than images, primarily because search engines are incapable of determining the contents by scanning the images. Instead, your site will be assessed by the words that are present in the source code.

9. Search engine crawlers are also incapable of indexing Flash. This means static HTML text usually fare better than sites that are flash based and should be used whenever possible.

10. It often takes time to climb to the top. A lot of patience combined with following some of the basic rules of search engine rankings is sure to pay off in the end. Don't be deterred by rumours of Google sandbox, where new sites are barred from achieving a high ranking for several months. These are just baseless rumours and nobody has proven whether or not it really exists.