If you are considering how to provide better website content to your website then article writing is a great way help. Search engines love content, keeping your site fresh will provide better customer retention, better rankings and better traffic to your site.

If you’re writing articles (article marketing) to increase your website marketing efforts then article optimization should be utilized along with it. What’s article optimization? It’s essentially the process where when writing an article the verbiage is optimized specifically for the search engines and your website.

When article optimization is used throughout the process it allows the article to be more search engine friendly. Why is that important to you, because it allows the article to become a very powerful marketing tool.

You get best of both worlds, well actually even more. You add value to your site by giving the reader another reason to come back, something interesting read, and powerful content is added, keeping the site fresh. One of the main things that's not being utilized enough is keeping websites fresh, it will get crawled and indexed more often, helping get better rankings / listings, which the search engines love. And lastly you are adding those all so important incoming links. How’s that you say? Well not only should you add the articles to your site you should distribute them to ezine directories and other industry portals on the web. And if you’ve ever tried to get high quality incoming links before you know how difficult and time consuming that can be!

I’ve been asked fairly often, why this powerful marketing tool isn’t used more often. To name a few, first most people either feel that they don’t know what to write and two, it can be very time consuming. Plus the “how to” part of article optimization is not common knowledge. In other words it’s one thing to write an article about your industry and another to make sure it’s optimized well for the search engines like Google. Google and others look for certain things for ranking purposes, such as the keywords and keyword density to name a few.

The main things to remember are, write about what you know, as you write think about what keywords might be important to the reader and the search engines, as in what people may use to locate your site in search engines. And two don’t revolve your whole article based on keywords or you may not have a “reader friendly” article or a “search engine friendly” article. By thinking too hard about how to plant keywords in your article may back fire and may not be the success you were looking for.

So if decide to write the article and not optimize it, I recommend using an SEO firm for assistance. If you decide to do neither, you could hire a professional copywriter and SEO person or a firm that does both.