The Keyword Article Writer

Jakob Nielsen has been around since before the Mosaic web browser (if you remember that, you get ten extra geek points!) working on interface and web usability. Since the Internet is, at its core, based around text and text indexing, he became one of the grand masters of good online writing as well.

His main website, UseIt.com, makes money by hawking Nielsen’s books and how-to web conferences, mostly held on the West Coast. But being a truly savvy user of online resources from way, way back, Nielsen also understands that in order to gain and hold a audience, it is critical to offer them excellent usable information in many forms.

At UseIt.com, you’ll find dozens of reports and hundreds of articles on Nielsen’s usability studies. Many have more to do with site architecture and how to put information together than actual writing — but a significant number of his pieces will teach you how to be a better keyword article writer, and most use real-world usability statistics and studies to support what he is selling you. If you only visit one site besides this one to learn about online writing, make it UseIt.com.

Your weekly notice for future hot topics:

One Month Out:

• Father’s Day, June 21
• Juneteenth, June 19
• Flag Day, June 14
• All the anniversaries of people who had a June wedding!
• Summer officially starts on June 21, so this is a good time to start bringing out all the summer content.
• And don’t forget school holidays and family vacations.

Two Months Out:

• The Fourth of July – but only barely two months, so now’s a good time to start these.

Three Months Out:

• Ramadan starts, August 22
• Most U.S. schools restart in August, so it’s a good time for back-to-school content.

Any readers who have additional events to look for in the upcoming months, please add them in the comments section. If they’re good events that probably have a readership, I’ll add them and give you a linkback.

Most web professionals hear the term “keyword article writing” and scoff. Why? Because this type of web content writing has been given a bad name by people who barely write English — and that includes native speakers! — but who have learned how to sprinkle in the occasional “keyword” in their barely-coherent, redundant-information, semi-grammatical writing. This makes their articles little more than spider bait, a method to lure Google into ranking a site just a little bit higher than it would otherwise have been ranked. Dozens of these poorly-written keyword articles on a low-traffic keyword can get you a Google top ranking; hundreds or thousands on a medium-traffic keyword will get you a Google top ranking for that word.

This isn’t what I’m talking about on this site. A monkey could do this — for that matter, there are keyword article programs that can generate these, or take a single article and rearrange it into a dozen or so unique articles.

No, what I’m talking about is taking good, targeted writing with unique topics, and learning how to keyword THESE articles in such a way that the spiders come to them, not the crappy amateur articles. It can be done. I’ve done it, for dozens of clients.

The advantage of writing this way is that it naturally gains multiple Google advantages, as well as real-world marketing advantages that many online marketers forget about. Let’s start with the following four:

Natural LSI Keywording

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. This esoteric term refers to a keywording technique that allows advanced search engines to distinguish pages that may be pertinent to a keyword search from pages that are likely pertinent to a keyword search. For example, suppose you are looking for palm reading. Your search returns in a traditional Google search will include the occult type of palm reading — but will also include returns related to the Palm pilot and its reading programs. LSI helps Google distinguish between the two types of palm reading by looking inside the text on the page for related terms.

There will be much, much more on LSI in the future on this site. LSI is something that cannot be taught — but I can teach you how to find out what related words Google is currently looking at for certain keywords, as well as how to use your innate vocabulary to naturally strengthen the organic LSI in your well-written articles.

LSI, in the future, will probably destroy the industry for those badly-written keyword articles I referred to at the beginning. Thank God.

Superior Linkbait

What would you send your own site readers to, poorly-written redundant gibberish that was obviously written to draw search engines, or quality content that provides them with information they will be interested in? The answer is obvious.

Linkbait is web content used to attract links from other websites. The best linkbait is generally stuff like tools or freebie programs, but great articles and even ebooks are also superb linkbait. If you learn to write articles that are both linkbait and spiderbait, you have a real advantage.

Return Traffic From Potential Customers

Customers come back to websites that provide them with information and tools they need. Poorly-written redundant content, no matter how well keyworded, will drive away customers. Great articles, with regular fresh content and plenty of evergreen content, will keep them coming back, and may get them sending their friends.

Future Ebook Creation

One of the most-overlooked tools you can use online: free ebooks based on your own site content. If you plan out your articles well, you can use them to create fantastic free ebooks that will draw customers. The smart website owner will implement this tool as a means to get people to sign up for free emailed newsletters, enabling them to use push marketing to bring potential customers back over and over. Obviously, poorly-written and redundant articles cannot be used in this way!

Well-written keyword articles can perform these and many other marketing tasks for smart web marketers; skill with creating this sort of web content can guarantee you a client base that will grow even as the Internet itself grows and develops in the future.

I’ve been writing for the Web since 1998, when I talked my boss into letting me create and administer a website for our School of Nursing. I’ve learned several things about web writing over the decade or so since:

1. Online writing is very different from traditional writing. You need to write shorter, more to the point. You need to grab and hold attention. Bullets and lists are de rigeur, and simple words are preferred to exquisite latinate phrases.

2. Spelling and grammar are less important to online readers than they are to me.

3. Searchability is key — if the reader cannot find your article, he’s not going to read it.

4. Headlines are critical. Your article title is usually used as the link back to your page, and often makes its way into the URL of page. But online headlines should be written very, very differently from newspaper or magazine headlines.

5. The Web is more personal than other forms of mass media. Very, very targeted articles will find good readership, while the same articles would be unusable in traditional print media.

6. The Web lends itself well to very localized writing, down to neighborhoods, even though it is the only truly global form of mass media.

7. Evergreen content — articles that are always current — is better than temporal content, in the long run. By writing articles that can be used for years, you open up your readership to those coming along years from now and maximize long-term earning potential. This is why there are so many recipe sites online, but so few that focus on 2006 Memorial Day celebrations.

There are many other differences — but perhaps the most outstanding of all differences is that searchability thing. In print media, readers locate content by viewing magazines, newspapers, or books that they think have the information they want in them, and then thumbing through the pages for the articles that are pertinent to them. This is an inefficient means to find information, but the only one available to print media (short of going to the library and thumbing through Books in Print).

The Internet, on the other hand, indexes everything to the individual word, and Google in particular has created an industry on making the most pertinent information easily findable. Your job, as a keyword article writer: use the tools the Internet, and especially Google, have created to make your article completely findable to the specific audience for which you are writing.