What An Content Syndication Writer Needs to Know

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 at 10:59 am

No matter what your profession, there will be a set of skills and a set of knowledge that are necessary for performing the task properly. This is as true of writing for the purpose of article marketing as it is for a chemist.

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

Search engine optimization (SEO) is at the heart of any article marketing. You not doubt recognize that SEO is a very complex notion, 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) 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: 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. They also sell a version of the same software that can check up to twenty five articles at a time, as long as they are in .txt format.

In addition to that limited understanding of SEO, a professional content syndication author should also be familiar with a concept called article spinning. Content spinning is simply providing alternatives for segments of the article. The segments might be single words, phrases, sentences or even complete paragraphs. After the multiple variations are written and properly coded, they are then entered into article marketing software that randomly selects from the many alternatives. The type of software is called a spinner.

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