Netsense Intelligence

As promised here is the 3rd part of this 5-part series focusing on how to win the battle for article marketing visitor superiority and it covers keywords. To keep things simple, I’m not going to go into detail on how niche specific keyword phrases can be found. Instead I’m going to focus on how I use the keywords once identified because I realize in general that many different marketers each have their own favorite way for doing keyword research. I’m personally fond of taking a caveman like approach and do most of my keyword research using the article directories themselves.

I will provide this one insider tip on where I routinely find profitable niche keyword phrases. Most people know that I use Ezinearticles.com as my primary source for keyword mining but I’ve also been obtaining fantastic keyword phrases from AssociatedContent.com and Articlesbase.com. If you know anything about my keyword research techniques and methods then having revealed those other 2 article directories as my sources for keywords should have you searching those two directories for niche keyword phrases you can easily dominate with articles. In the event someone has any questions or would like some clarity about my methods please don’t hesitate to ask.

Where I Use My Keyword Phrases

Without a doubt, I have determined that the best ROI for your keyword phrase comes from making sure it is used in your article title. As mentioned in the article title post, I look to try and use the keyword phrase closer to the beginning of my article title and if I can swing it again towards the end of my title or sprinkled throughout the remainder of the title.

In case you are wondering just how powerful the effect of having your keyword phrase in your title is, consider this. I have seen articles rank on the first page of Google for specific niche keyword phrases by merely having the phrase in the title of the article and nowhere else within the article itself. I can’t begin to stress the importance of this task so always make sure your article title has the keyword phrase you want your article to rank for within the actual title.

The next place to use your keyword phrase is in the article summary. This may or may not help as much with the SEO side of the house but it definitely helps on the human visitor side because when they see the keyword phrase they are searching for in the article title and then highlighted/mentioned again in the article summary it starts to cement into their mind that this article contains information that is pertinent to the search they are conducting. Many marketing books advocate that a user must be exposed to a message 7 times before they react in the manner you desire. Between the article title and article summary you have 2 opportunities to engage the human visitor (consumer) with your message leaving only 5 more exposures needed to obtain the desired outcome.

The next place to use your keyword phrase is within the actual keyword section (I’m talking mainly about Ezinearticles.com but it is the same for most of the top article directories). This section here is primarily for SEO purposes and is probably never seen by a human visitor so unfortunately you don’t cash in on the 7 marketing exposure requirements but you do further enhance SEO spider love. I have found that the best results are obtained by including the keyword phrase along with any complimentary keywords in your targeted keyword list – I know, I know,… clear as mud right.

The next spot in the construction of your article where you absolutely must have your keyword phrase is within the first sentence of your actual article. If you notice when you do a search for a keyword phrase on Google, you will get the results which are the title of the page (in this case your article) and a small snippet of text. This text is obtained from the first few lines of the actual article so once again, here is an opportunity to take advantage of the 7 marketing exposures for your specific keyword phrase. I also strongly believe that there is some weight given by the search engines to having your phrase in the first sentence of your article because in the search engine results the keywords are highlighted in your title and they are also highlighted in the snippet of text that is also provided as part of the search engine results.

The remaining number of times you would use your keyword phrase throughout your article is based entirely upon the length of your article. As you would expect, a 250 word article offers very little maneuver room for you in terms of the number of times you can place your keyword phrase within the article (once, maybe twice if you’re lucky). Generally I prefer to have my articles to have at least 350 words of real content in them with the upper limit hovering around 500. For a 350 word article you can expect to use your keyword phrase about 3 times max where a 500 word article offers you one additional time to squeeze the actual keyword phrase in without tripping the keyword spamming alarms at Ezinearticles.com.

In case you’ve been keeping count, your keyword phrase will have been exposed at least 4 times to your reader (once in the article title and 3 times in your article) with an additional exposure coming from the article summary or the snippet of text provided by the search engines for a running total of 5 times. The 6th exposure comes from within your resource box. The resource box is where I make every attempt to have my keyword phrase as my anchor text for the link back to my website (where conveniently enough the 7th exposure of your keyword phrase to your reader and hopefully obtains your desired response).

As with my article title and the first paragraph of my article, I try and have the keyword phrase at the very beginning of the resource box. Ezinearticles.com did make this a bit harder to do when they cut down the words you could use for your anchor text to only 3 but they really had no choice when it came to implementing this rule because there were some authors that were using entire sentences as their anchor text backlink. One helpful gesture from Ezinearticles.com is that the anchor text can have a few additional words (an additional 1 or 2) if it does provide value to the reader and is not merely for the benefit of obtaining a longer keyword rich anchor text backlink to your website.

This post was a bit shorter but it does conclude the keyword section on where I use my keywords in order to keep all parties on my side (the search engines, the article directories and the human visitor) and to help further my battle for visitor superiority. The next installment of this series will focus on the actual construction of the article body.