Last week we discussed the importance of the title and why you should start there. So, I assume that you have your title and that it is grabbing your readers attention. Next thing you want to do is show them the value they will gain from reading your article. You do this with your article summary. The summary is important, because when your article gets syndicated it is the title and the summary that are being published. Furthermore, the summary should entice your reader to read the entire article. In stead of using the first paragraph of your article, you should write a separate summary that will get your readers attention.
If you want to learn how to do this, you may want to study the headlines and summary text that AOL puts on their home page, where they rotate 8 or 9 stories. Here is an example. The title says: “Feeling Forgetful? Go Mow the Lawn”. And the summary reads: “Researchers found that the scent of freshly cut grass stimulates the area of the brain that boosts memory. Low-calorie treat has similar effect…”
When you read that don’t you want to know what low-calorie treat they are talking about? So, you read the article. AOL does a great job of creating summaries that make you want to read the entire article. If you want to learn how to create a good summary, make sure to regularly spend time on their home page.
Next thing I normally write is the solution to a problem I am talking about or the correct or better way to do something or even a review on a product or service. This part normally takes the longest. Once I have the summary and the message I am trying to get across, connecting the dots is easy. Just make sure that every paragraph is an invitation to read the next one.
If you follow this pattern, you will have an interesting and attention grabbing article written in no time. Now that you have the text, you want to proof read it and make sure that your long tail keyword is in it enough and in the right places. You want your long tail keyword phrase once in the first paragraph and once in the concluding paragraph. Make sure it is in the rest of the article, if appropriate. Definitely don’t overdo it, just to satisfy the search engines. This is not a good practice and makes your article unreadable.
These days the search engines are more looking for related keywords anyway. They are not just counting the number of times you mention your keyword, but they are also looking for words that they know are related to your keyword. When you write your article in a natural way you will automatically include those words. No need to pay too much attention to this any longer.
Unless you are posting the article to your own blog, every article ends with the resource box, where you put the links to your website. Since this is critical to get both backlinks and traffic to your site I will exclusively focus on this next week.
