There are certain sets of skills and knowledge that must be mastered in any task.  This pertains to writing for [1] article marketing as much as any profession.

In another article I’ll offer some of the specific skill sets involved in [2] professional article writing.  I want to concentrate this article, in fairly broad terms, on the necessary knowledge sets.

At the heart of the purpose of article marketing is search engine optimization (SEO).  I’m sure you realize that SEO is a very complex field in its own write, and, because the search engines are continually updating the algorithms that impact search engine results, the variables of SEO are frequently changing.  However, if we are only considering the task of the writer, we can narrow the list of specific aspects of search engine optimization to just a few.

Use of Keywords: 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.  Try to include your keyword (or at least part of the key phrase) in the article’s title.

2.  If possible, include your primary keyword in the article’s first paragraph (or the second paragraph at latest).

3.  Avoid using any keyword or key phrase much more often than ten percent of the time or much less often than 3 percent.

4.  Do not try to search engine optimize for more than three versions of a key phrase in the same article.

Content Duplication: If you are contracted to write multiple articles pertaining to the same keyword or small keyword list, you must make sure that the articles are sufficiently unique that the search engines will recognize them as different content.    It may take a while for the search robot to recognize the similarity, especially if the duplication appears on different sites, but eventually one of more of the major search engines will consider one of the articles as redundant information and only list the other in any results.  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] article marketing software, in addition to being mindful of SEO 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.