Free Website Traffic - Using Keywords In Ezine Articles

Writing ezine articles is one of the top ways to drive increased traffic to your website. Three of the advantages of using articles in your marketing are: it is effective, it is easy, and it is free. All you need in order to be an author of ezine articles is a reasonable knowledge of spelling and grammar, and a willingness to spend some time writing articles.

To use ezine articles successfully as a means of obtaining free website traffic, you also need to know the right way to use keywords in your articles. An article without relevant keywords or with poor a keyword framework is of limited use as a promotional tool.

Firstly, you need to choose your keywords wisely by picking keywords or phrases that get regular searches but don't have millions of web pages already in competition for that search term. Secondly, you must know how to use the keywords in your articles.

One thing you have to avoid is what is known as "keyword spamming". This refers to the practice of over-use of a keyword with the intention of attracting the search engines. How does a search engine determine the author's intention? As even Google hasn't yet developed a way of reading minds, the search engines have to rely on mathematical ways of hunting out your secret thoughts. Life for ezine article authors is made a little more complicated by the fact that we are not privy to how these algorithms and mathematical equations work; we have to go on the basis of best guesses.

The current best guess of what the search engines deem to be the appropriate level of keyword density in an article is that it is about 1%. That sounds very low but if you take a 500 word article comprising of four paragraphs, it equates to once per paragraph and once in the title. If you are using a single word, it could seem quite natural to use it more often but, it you are writing around a five word phrase, your article would probably read oddly if the phrase was used more than once in each paragraph. It is far better to use one main key phrase plus a secondary phrase and keep both of them down to a density of no more than 1%.

The best way to employ your keyword is to use it in the title of your article, once in the first and final paragraphs and two or three times in the rest of the body of the article (to be adjusted depending upon the word count). The keyword should be used within the first three or four words of your article title in order to grab human attention and to show the search engines that it is an important word.

Writing in a natural way using carefully selected keywords in the correct density is the key to writing a good ezine article. Of course, you are hoping for some extra free website traffic in return for your efforts, but pleasing the search engines is only part of the puzzle: appealing to human readers should take priority because they are your potential customers.