How to write articles that benefit your search engine rankings

Writing and submitting articles is a great way to promote yourself and your Internet business. As an article writer you can achieve personal branding throughout the web, as well as earn credibility within a specific subject matter

By guest writer Brandon Leibowitz

Articles can be used for SEO (search engine optimization) purposes. Writing and distributing articles throughout the web is a great way to increase your company’s exposure.

The more information posted on the web about your company, the better off your company will be. This is because more people will become aware of your website and be inclined to learn more about it.

Here are three steps to writing articles that improve your search engine rankings.

Your article and link building

Each article that is written can be distributed through out the web. There are lots of web sites that host articles for free; or you can publish them on your own website. Either way you are adding new content and receiving a one-way link from the article.

For those of you not familiar with SEO, one-way links are extremely valuable. The search engines view links as votes. The more votes you have, the higher you will be in the natural search engine results. Link can either be reciprocal (I link to your site and you link back to my site) or one-way (you link to my site only). The more one-way links a site has the higher up it will be in the search engine rankings.

Make sure that every article you publish online has a section about the author (you) where a link can be placed. Some article sites even allow you to post links in the article. All these links will help you increase your website’s exposure and search engine rankings.

Preparing your article and the search engines

Articles also add fresh, new content to the web. The search engine spiders are constantly looking for content throughout the World Wide Web. Once the spider discovers new content, it will be indexed and can appear in the search engine results.

You can tune your articles around carefully selected keywords for SEO purposes. With some practice, this may get you top rankings on the search engines for competitive keywords.

Distributing your article

After an article has been written it is time to publish it. If your main objective is to generate inbound links you need to have it published on a site different than your own. There are different options: You can use an article submission site, article submission software, or manually submit articles to sites that cover your topic of interest.

Websites such as Digg allow users to “Digg” or vote on articles. Articles receiving the most votes achieve the exposure coming from the first page of such a high traffic site. Make an effort promoting your own articles thorughout the social web.

Readers can also comment on articles, something new to the web. Readers can agree or disagree with you and their responses can be seen by anyone reading the article. This means you must be careful when writing articles, you must be accurate and not copy anyone else’s work.

You can also take part in such discussions, promoting yourself as a reliable expert in the process.
Note that with the recent developments in the web (Web 2.0) articles can now be shared through RSS feeds. This offers even greater reach and exposure for articles.

Your article and your products

Articles can be a great way to inform potential customers about the benefits of a specific product or service. Many shoppers would like to get more information about a product or service before making a purchase.

If your web site markets specific products, make sure you write articles that give readers the information they are seeking out before making a purchase. You will help them make an educated and informed purchase. Even better: Makes sure this information is linked back to your website.

To sum it up, write high quality, keyword rich, new articles for the search engines and your new customers. You will see the benefits, as your website traffic increases and your search engine rankings increase as well.

Author Bio
Brandon Leibowitz has been a search engine optimization and marketing consulting with over five years of industry knowledge.