Writing Submissions – Good Writing and Good SEO
There were days when websites promoted themselves using techniques such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, creating duplicate content and others, techniques for which sites are now banned by search engines if still used. Keyword stuffing refers to loading a page with keywords either in the meta tags or within the content, and cloaking refers to presenting the search engine spiders with a different version of the page than that available to page visitors. These days, content is valued more not only by readers but by the algorithms search engines use too.
A good website needs to promote itself especially through content, but this content needs to be optimized for search engines for best results. You can promote your site not only through its own content, but through writing submissions to article directories. Once your articles are in such directories, links to your website can be included in the author box and thus you have backlinks built for your site.
Backlinking helps your website gain the attention of search engines; however, backlinking associated with bad content or sites with low page ranks is not an efficient technique. The content you spread around represents your image in front of both readers and search engines.
If you do not trust your writing skills or have no time for creating articles, then you can hire someone else to write for you. You can also turn to article submission websites, which can do the writing for you and also distribute articles to appropriate publishing sites. If you are into writing, however, we will present some tips for efficient writing in the following.
Tips for efficient writing submissions
• First of all, as we have already said, you need to have quality content, whether you post on your own blog or on an article submission site. All in all, that is why people spend time on the Internet: to find information, so you do not want them to feel that they are wasting their time reading one of your pieces.
• You can improve your writing skills by taking special courses or reading as many articles as possible from respected sources, so that you end up naturally imitating a style. Try to use good resources – solid information, that is – and also let your personality flow between the words, to make the reading more interesting. At some point, you will discover your own style.
• Make a research for keywords related to your domain – discover what queries people use to reach information specific to your industry. There are online tools that can help you with this. Then, use these queries and turn them into keywords to spread throughout your articles. This way, next time someone uses those queries, it is your article search engines might return among the first hits. Keywords describe the purpose of the article: just like when you have chosen among domain names one that can truly represent you, so do keywords have the purpose of representing the scope and the topic of the article.
• Try to offer something new through the article, a piece of information that is not easily found, a useful opinion, a case study or maybe just humor. Writing submissions must be interesting to keep visitors coming for more.
• Credit those whose articles you’ve used for inspiration. Despite common opinion, this will not negatively impact your rankings. It can actually help.
• Placement of keywords: use the main keyword in the title and a subtitle of the article. The recommended keyword density varies with sources, from 0.5% to 2% or even 9%. Some also say that the correlation between a particular keyword density and rankings is not as strong as it used to be. Our suggestion is to use a main keyword once per one hundred words, preferably with its occurrence in the first and in the last paragraph. Using related keywords is also a good thing, as they strengthen the main keyword and help readers not get tired with repetitions. It is very important not to exaggerate with using a keyword: readers do not appreciate it, and if they don’t, nor do search engines. Moreover, excessive repetition can make you suspect of spamming in the eyes of search spiders. Google, for example, now has a so-called “over-optimized” penalty. Google does not appreciate pages that were optimized to rank well without actually providing quality.
• Proofread what you have written. It can easily happen to forget deleting words you have decided to give up on, misspell others, or you might decide that two paragraphs need to be interchanged. When reading your article fully before uploading it, you can find little mistakes that, left there otherwise, can have important impact on readers or can simply get your article rejected by the submission sites.
• If you want good ranks, ask yourself if you could read your own article when in need of a piece of information and actually find it useful. If you wouldn’t, then work on it a little more.
• It is okay to disagree with one of your presented points. Google appreciates writers that can present multiple points of view on a subject.
• Never use spun content or PLR content.
• Don’t use blackhat SEO techniques for building links. Submitting articles to directories or promoting your articles in social media (Facebook, Twitter, Digg) will bring you quality backlinks anyway.
Keep these tips in mind and your article submissions will surely get your site ranking higher.
