No matter what your profession, you can identify a set of skills and a set of knowledge that are prerequisites for executing the task well.  This is as true of writing for the purpose of [1] article marketing as it is for a neurosurgeon.

I’ll leave the particular skill sets necessary for someone who provides [2] professional article writing for marketing purposes for another time.  In this short piece, I want to use this article to suggest what such a writer needs to know.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is at the heart of any article marketing.  I’m sure you realize that SEO is a very complex field in its own write, and it changes frequently as the search engines are continually refining their algorithms to try to deliver ever improving results for users.  However, we can keep the list of SEO variables that apply specifically to a writer to a manageably short list.

Keyword Use: Sometimes one hears very specific recommendation about, for example, how often a keyword should be used in an article.  One person might say, “You must use your keyword between 5% and 8% of the time.”  However, there is no consistent statistical evidence that gives us any magic percentate.  With a broad stroke, I can offer some basic guidelines, but do not consider them rules that must be followed in every situation.  1) It is helpful for the keyword, or at least part of a long tail key phrase, to be included in the article title.  2)  It is best if the keyword appears in the first paragraph of the article.  The second paragraph is the deepest into the article you should go before the keyword or key phrase should make its first appearance in the article’s body.  3) You should avoid using any keyword more that ten percent of the time in the article. 4) You should not ever try to use an article to search engine optimize for more than three variations of a keyword.

Content Duplication: Make certain that your articles are sufficiently different from each other, if you are assigned to write more that one article for the same keyword or short keyword list.  Otherwise search engines may see them as the same content.  When that occurs, one one of the articles will remain in the search engine’s index.    At first, the search engine may list multiple identical content, however over time the search robots will classify the duplicate content as redundant and stop indexing all but one of the versions.  At a website, dupecop.com, there is a free tool available that will compare up to four articles to score the uniqueness of each against the others.  The same site offers a version of the software for use on your own desktop that will compare up to twenty-five articles simultaneously.  It is priced very reasonably, and I use mine on an almost daily basis.

A good article marketing writer should also be familiar with a concept called article spinning and useful [3] software for article marketing, in addition to being mindful of search engine optimization guidelines.  Article spinning is nothing more than providing alternative words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs throughout the article.  The function of the software is to randomly select from the available alternatives.  While the process of preparing an article for spinning is quite time consuming, it is a highly effective way of generating unique versions of the same article.  In the end, it is faster than writing more articles from scratch.