How to write articles that want to be found

Once you have your blog up and running it can be frustrating to see that your traffic doens’t take off right away. There are lots of ways get traffic that take alot of manual effort. Once I figured out how to write articles that want to be read, I began to see a lot of new traffic coming to my pages that didn’t require any effort on my part, because people were already looking them.

The key to a successful article is to write with purpose. Many times a post is just a repeat of something that’s has already been said before or its a random collection of your thoughts. If you want what you’ve written to be found by people then you need to keep the reader in mind from the beginning. Before you even start writing, you should think about why this person is going to want to read this particular article. What question are you answering? What need does this article fufill for the reader?

To demonstrate my point, I’m want to show a very simple post from a blog I am working on.

5 SEO Tricks

Although it’s not a complete mistake that this article ranked high on the search engines. I used a few tricks I learned to give it an extra boost. Starting from the top down:

1. URL includes the phrase I’m targeting.

…/2009/09/batman-arkham-asylum-achievements-unlockables/

2.Title Includes the phrase i’m targeting.

Batman Arkham Asylum Achievements & Unlockables Guide

3. Image is at the TOP of the article and uses a descriptive alt tag.

“Batman Arkham Asylum Video Game”

4. First 160 words inculdes the keyword phrase

5. Header Tags include keywords

- Unlockables

- Achievements

Other Tricks

Since the original date of the post this article has moved down in the rankings due to increased competition, but because I got on it early I was able to get lots of new readers. Today a link to this article still shows up on the second page in the form of the Digg.com submission link. (Even though it only ever got 1 Digg) Another reason why its important to submit your articles to sites that get indexed high on the search rankings.

In the end just remember that when you are writing an article that wants to be seen try to ask yourself, “Who is the person that is going to read this? and Why would they be looking for it?