If this is how you feel about article writing and creating SEO content then either you’re in the wrong business, or you’re making my job a great deal easier, because my articles will be out-performing yours by such a huge factor you may as well not be writing any at all. Titles are one of the most critical parts of any SEO article, and for several good reasons.

First of all, the majority of articles in article directories are discovered by those looking for information through the search engines. A keyword search will result in a great long list of possible results – often thousands or even millions of them. The most visually striking element within the search results listings are the titles. These are either the titles of the web pages, or the titles of the articles.

This means that the first thing anyone is likely to see is the title of your article. If it stands out and looks interesting and relevant then perhaps some people might glance down at the couple of lines underneath it, which will generally be taken from your summary or teaser section. Only if this seems relevant will people click on the link and read your article. This means that if you fail with your title, then your entire article fails, because no one will click on the link.

The same is true for those people who find your article by browsing a list of recently published articles on any particular directory, or a list of recent blog posts. There’s simply too much information on the web for people to give seemingly irrelevant or uninteresting content much more than a cursory glance. If you don’t capture their interest immediately, someone else will.

Titles are also a key part of the whole search engine optimisation process, because the search engines will often use the title to determine the contextual relevance of the article. It’s generally agreed that having your keyword or keyphrase towards the beginning of your article works best, giving your article the best chance of being picked up and indexed quickly for the right keywords.

Titles need to be optimised for both the search engines and real people. Fail to spend enough time and effort on your titles and you could lose both, leaving you with a whole page of words nobody’s ever going to see.

If you’re writing an article as content for your website, or as a service to deliver useful information to be people, or as part of a newsletter distributing information to subscribers, then your article needs to be exactly long enough for you to make your point. Clearly providing an article not long to explain yourself is of little value, and waffling on for ages after you’ve made your point is a waste of people’s time. Write an article, make your point, stop.

However, what many people ask is how long an SEO article should be. My initial answer is simply that it should be the same length as it takes to make your point. Why should SEO articles be any different? If you’re covering a complex subject then stopping at 400 words is unlikely to enable you to explain the topic adequately.

Similarly writing 1,000 words on a fairly easy to understand point is likely to put people off reading your articles in future – that’s if anyone actually made it to the end of your first article to find out who the author was.

But what we’re really talking about here is how much content is best to give the search engines a fighting chance of picking up on your article and considering it relevant enough to the topic to list it prominently in the search results pages.

One of the most important things to consider when writing high quality SEO articles and web content is to ensure that your vocabulary is as broadly relevant to the subject as possible, as it is the subject specific vocabulary which is going to help the search engines apply their Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) process to determine the context and likely relevance of the content.

Therefore if you write a 1,000 piece but use very little subject relevant language you may find that it has less impact and success than a 500 word article which packs a good deal of contextually relevant vocabulary into every paragraph.

No, I’m not talking about keywords – just subject relevant vocabulary which any good writer would use when covering a topic. For example, read this article again carefully and see if you can pick out just how many words relate to writing, articles, web content development, search engines and online business marketing.

Very few of them are repeated much, but they’re all there, and this article is only a little over 500 words. 500-700 is the sweet spot, but a word count alone is never enough. Make sure you use a broad and highly relevant vocabulary, and you’ll have a perfect recipe.

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Clearly a basic description of the product may well prove to be lacking in inspiration, so although you may have to briefly refer to its physical appearance, properties or attributes, the main focus of your article needs to take a more original approach. If the subject is ‘dull’, then the approach needs to compensate for that. So what approaches can SEO articles writers take that will help spice up subjects as scintillating as men’s knee length woollen socks?

The first technique is to tell a story. This could be a first person account of an event or a humorous description of a situation someone you know found themselves in. The product needs to feature within the story in a prominent, and positive way, but the story itself should be humorous, engaging and reasonably believable.

It’s difficult to give specific examples because of course everyone’s style of writing is different, and the product will restrict the kind of story that can be used. But perhaps if the subject was wallpaper paste you could describe a friend who tried to economise, and made up his own paste, with somewhat disastrous consequences (perhaps the wallpaper peeled off and landed in the soup just as the mother-in-law was about to start eating, or the hapless DIY enthusiast managed to get himself glued to the wall.)

Another approach is to take an opposite view from that which might be expected. So, as an example, if faced with an article about ice scrapers for car windscreens, you could suggest that you consider them a total waste of money, suggesting innovative and bizarre alternatives such as strapping half a dozen hot water bottles all over the windscreen or bolting a kettle to the roof of the car to collect and boil rainwater that can then be released across all the windows. By taking a novel and ridiculous view like this you’re effectively making it clear how good the product is, but in a way that’s more likely to get people to read.

The problem is that dull subjects aren’t just difficult for article writers to write about, they’re also difficult to read. People just don’t want to read an article about socks, ping pong balls or ice scrapers – unless their interest is quickly gained through the use of a quirky, surprising or humorous title that’s quickly followed up by a summary and first paragraph that keeps the interest going.

By using either of these two example approaches it’s perfectly possible to actually have fun as an article writer creating SEO content on less interesting subjects and, more importantly, creating content that’s more likely to be read, enjoyed, shared and which results in a boost in traffic and sales.

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Bing currently holds over 7% of the search market – that’s several billion searches a month, and if you’re above the crease on page one you can be pretty confident that you’ll be enjoying a high number of hits. So how are professional content writing services optimising content for Bing?

Optimising for Bing necessarily involves some overlap with the methods you’re currently employing in order to optimise for Google. But the overlapped segments of your optimisation strategy are not enough to make it with Bing. To dominate within Microsoft’s search engine you have to pull out a few extra stops.

Firstly, your exiting SEO strategy probably focuses heavily on creating high quality back links. However, Bing rewards site developers who have a less selfish attitude, and are more egalitarian. This means that professional content writing services are now introducing high quality links to external sites within their own content. Including a few links to reputable sites such as Microsoft, Wikipedia and the BBC implies that the content is rather better researched, and therefore more reliable. This is one way in which you can boost your ranking on Bing, but it’s not the only way.

Bing has recently announced that as part of their analysis of sites’ relevance they are going to be taking into account the behaviour of people. One of the specific ways Microsoft has cited they’ll do this is by monitoring the use of the ‘Back’ button in the browser. If a user types in a particular keyphrase, and your website is listed high up the search results for that keyphrase, the user is likely to click the link.

However, if they hit the ‘Back’ button fairly soon afterwards, and return to the search results, Bing will identify that behaviour as implying that your website was not relevant for that search query, and demote the listing. So having plenty of high ranking external links as well as high quality content is still not enough. Now that content has to engage with users in a way that will significantly reduce the chance of a single page bounce returning people to the search results.

Professional content writing services are achieving this by creating a regular stream of new, fresh content, ensuring that the content is highly relevant and engaging, and structuring it in a way that encourages visitors to click internal links. This approach, in addition to traditional SEO techniques, low keyword density, broad subject sensitive vocabulary and use of headings, sub-headings and solid coding all adds up to an approach which is seeing some dramatic results for businesses making the effort to engage with the several billion people passing through Bing every month.

A tremendous number of SEO article writers have a simple format when it comes to creating a summary that’s really focussed on getting the reader to click the link and go on to read the full article: copy and paste the first sentence or two of the article.

Although in many cases this may work, it isn’t the best strategy, especially when most article writers focus on their main keyphrase within the first sentence, rather than on creating a catchy, enticing and engaging summary for the readers. The problem really stems from a perception of focus, or a misperception of focus.

Whilst the first few sentences within an SEO article are pretty important ones in terms of search engine optimisation, the summary is much less important in this regard. The summary is usually what’s seen in either the search results listings, or the listing on the article directory. It’s prime purpose is to capture the attention and interest of the reader, because unless this is achieved, the article will remain unread, and your links fairly worthless.

So what is the best approach when creating an article summary that will ensure your audience wants to read more of what you have written? One of the easiest ways of starting to think about how to approach this is to imagine you’re in a pub sitting round a table with half a dozen of your friends, sharing gossip. Suddenly a story hits you that you want to tell them, but everyone’s keen to have their but of gossip heard. So what do you do?

You make a short, simple statement that you know will whet their appetite, get everyone else to shut up, and leave them hanging on your every word. It’s something most of us know how to do, and it’s a skill we use when it suits us. Writing SEO articles and developing an effective summary should be approached in the same way. Except that your audience isn’t sitting round a table at a pub with a drink in hand and a readiness to listen to your gossip. Your online audience is much harder to convince, and so you have to work hard to gain their attention.

One of the most important points to appreciate is that you must know who your audience is, and what they’re looking for. Knowing what someone is looking for means that you can shock them, surprise them or intrigue them more easily. Again, back at the pub your tactic would be much less successful were it not for the fact that you knew your friends would be interested in that particular type of gossip. If your audience is likely to be looking for information on how to do something a little better, surprise them by suggesting that their approach is wrong, or that their hopes are about to be realised.

But then there is another important rule – make sure you deliver on your promise. It’s no good shocking or surprising someone with a stunning summary only to let them down when it comes to the article itself. You must make sure that your article delivers as promised.

When it comes to writing summaries I tend to wait until I have written the article completely. After all, how can you summarise something that hasn’t been written yet? Once I have written my article I think again about who my audience is, what they’re looking for and why they’re likely to have clicked the link that brought them to my article. Then I think about a way of phrasing my summary that will intrigue them quickly and effectively, without giving away the answer.

This is the final rule – don’t summarise your article in the summary. Okay, so I have slightly contradicted myself here, but the thing is that if your title suggests that you’ll describe 3 ways of doing something, and your summary explains those three ways fairly well, no one’s going to bother reading the article itself. Your summary must attract people, intrigue them, but not satisfy their curiosity. That’s what the article should do.

So, to summarise then, the simple format used to get your audience to read your article by creating an effective summary is:

1. Wait until you’ve actually written the article
2. Don’t just copy your first sentence or two
3. Make sure you know who your audience is, and what they’re likely to be looking for
4. Capture their attention quickly by shocking, surprising or intriguing them
5. Don’t summarise the entire article – leave them curious

The reason is because Bing has started to introduce a new way of assessing the relevance of the websites listed within the search results for specific keywords and phrases. The way it’s doing this is by moving away from a purely algorithmic analysis of words on the page and the integration of mathematical interpretations of external link structures. Now, it’s about real people’s behaviour.

It’s fairly easy to understand how this works. If you type in a search query you are likely to receive a fairly mammoth set of results. By choosing to click one of those results you’re telling the search engine that for your particular query this page looks as though it’s highly relevant. So far, so good. But then comes the crux.

Because if you visit the web page and you immediately see that it looks rather like a summer term school project thrown together by some 11 year old kid before his favourite TV show was on, you’re likely to hit the ‘Back’ button on your web browser. Even if the website looks professional, you may find that it isn’t really what you were looking for, and so again, hit the ‘Back’ button to return to the search results listing.

This behaviour is now being monitored by Bing, which means that every time a visitor to your site bounces from the single page view back to the search results listings, information is being recorded that suggests to the search engine that your website is less relevant for that particular search query. In other words, all that hard work and effort you have invested in getting your website high up the results for a particular keyphrase could quickly be in tatters.

One of the most important aspects for online marketers has been to get people to visit the website. Today, that’s no longer enough. Now it’s all about getting those people to stay on your website, clicking through to other pages within the site. Only by achieving this can webmasters hope to both convert visits to sales, as well as maintaining high ranking positions within the search results pages.

It seems that for those companies and businesses who are actively seeking UK article writers it is important to make sure that the person to whom you give the task is not merely farming it out to other people who might be anywhere on the planet.

For businesses which are based in the United Kingdom, and whose target audience are also based in the UK, it is clearly important to make sure that the person representing your business through search engine optimised web content and marketing articles is speaking the same language.

It’s often the little things, such as attention to local current affairs, an understanding of the peculiar British sense of humour, and of course the many colloquialisms and odd turns of words that simply don’t make any sense when translated, and pass many people by who don’t speak English as the first language.

Now don’t get me wrong, I think it is fantastic that there are so many people who create online content in English, yet do not speak it as their first language. I couldn’t write articles in any other language, and my only strategy for making myself understood when abroad is to speak up more loudly.

But UK article writers are able to represent UK businesses to UK audiences in ways that are more natural, and better received. In today’s world of quick and easy communication it can be very easy to fire off an email without really thinking about its tone, vocabulary or phrasing, and this can sometimes have disastrous consequences in terms of PR. Sometimes a perfectly good translation of an article into English simply doesn’t have the right feel to it.

The key point as far as UK based businesses are concerned is that the SEO article writer is single-handedly responsible for the public representation of the business.

For many customers the first voice they ‘hear’ is that of the article writer’s, and so to them the business actually is the article writer. If the impression is that the business is advertising itself as British, but when it communicates it does so with an international voice, this can detract from the impression that’s intended.

This is why so many more businesses are realising that rather than always opting for the cheapest option, it’s worth looking for UK article writers with a real pedigree in English writing, and an understanding of one of the most peculiar, idiosyncratic and often downright awkward languages on the planet.

To ask the question ‘where to put LSI keywords inside webpages’ is to demonstrate that the concept of LSI has been entirely confused with traditional keyword SEO. The two are very different beasts, and need to be treated as such. So to start with I’m going to quickly explain what LSI is, and how it works in terms of basic SEO. Then I shall demonstrate why the phrase ‘LSI keywords’ an unhappy oxymoron, and finally why the question of where to put LSI keywords inside webpages is one that cannot be answered in the way the many people want.

First of all, LSI is not a form of optimisation. It’s a way of assessing the likely relevance of a document to the perceived subject. One of the ways this is achieved is by cross referencing the breadth of vocabulary used with known, reliable and authoritative documents on the same subject. So an article about laptops is likely to have words such as screen, battery, weight, processor, work and so forth included throughout the article. If most of these words are missing, then this suggests a very shallow document that doesn’t really cover the subject very well. This may well be because every other sentence includes the phrase ‘buy cheap laptops’.

Some ‘SEO gurus’ misunderstand how to optimise content for the LSI algorithms, thinking that it means you have to come up with as broad a range of synonyms for your main keyword as possible. This is utter rubbish. There are many reasons why, but one such example is that no authoritative text is going to randomly switch between various synonyms for the main word. A reputable document on the subject of football is unlikely to call it football in one sentence, soccer in another and footie in the next. The one word will be used throughout, but with a wealth of subject related vocabulary included to support it.

So an article about SEO articles should not include a dozen words for ‘article’, but a dozen words relating to the subject of articles. Perhaps two dozen. These aren’t keywords – they’re simply subject related vocabulary used to support the main keyword.

So getting back to our earlier question of where to put LSI keywords inside web pages, we can see that since LSI is not a form of optimisation, it has almost nothing to do with keywords, and certainly there is no such thing as an LSI keyword. The closest you can get to such a concept would be to create a list of all of the relevant subject related words you can think of, and then try to include these. But the danger here is that by trying to force an extra long list of ‘keywords’ into an article the structure, tone and overall feel of the article is likely to be extremely off putting, and not just to your visitors.

So since LSI is not optimisation, and has nothing to do with keywords, it is clear that asking where to put LSI keywords inside web pages simply doesn’t make any sense. However, by forgetting keywords and keyphrases and by writing naturally, aiming your content at real people rather than computers, spiders and bots, you are much more likely to find the vocabulary you use is much more subject oriented, thereby helping to improve the likely ‘rating’ given to your article as part of the LSI assessment process.

For quite some time most SEO marketers have seen social media as simply another way to create more links. But to see social media in this way is to miss the point. The search engines haven’t missed the point, and so by viewing social media in a very two dimensional way many online marketers are destined for a much shorter online life expectancy than they hoped for.

In order to understand how the search engines are starting to view social media, and to understand therefore how online business owners and SEO specialists should be starting to look at social media, there’s a very simply experiment that you can try.

It requires nothing more than a vaguely decent imagination, because in order to understand how social media is now comparing to plain old link building, I simply want you to imagine a little high street with just two main buildings in it.

It doesn’t really matter whether they’re amusement arcades, museums, pound shops or left handed clockwork cheesegrater specialists, the point is, you need to imagine two separate shops of some kind. Now, the one on the left has a dozen doors lined up along the front. One after another, some smaller than others, some quite large double doors, some revolving doors, and some automatic sliding doors beckoning anyone who passes within a few feet of the entrance to step inside and explore some delightful wares.

Seems as though this is a good tactic. Why have just one door when a dozen or more can be built, encouraging more people to see the shop, and step inside? The easier something is to get in, the more people will do just that, surely?

You can probably see where I’m going with this. Link building has very much been along these sorts of lines, providing real live people as well as search engine spiders the chance to reach the website and step inside through a vast number of possible ‘doors’ or links. But what of the other shop?

This is our contrasting example to demonstrate in a simplified way how search engines are starting to take advantage of this phenomenon. You see the second shop, the one on the right, only has one door. But standing in front of that door is a long queue of people. They don’t seem bored or fed up, but anxious to join the queue, eager to get inside.

The first shop looks a little dead in comparison. Lots of doors, but no real enthusiasm. One door, and a veritable queue of people who clearly know something you don’t about what’s going on inside. If you’re British you’ll already have mentally joined the queue, because that’s what we British people do. We love queues.

But almost anyone with any sense of curiosity or desire to join in a good thing will at least move closer to find out more. Social media provides search engines with this virtual queue. By analysing the way people interact with website content, the way they behave with links and they way they respond to websites, search engines can learn which sites are really popular and relevant, as opposed to which site owners have simply invested more time and money building back links as though they were bricks in a wall.

Building links in the same way people build walls is not the way to create doors. By appealing to real people in a way that gets them to respond positively, sharing the discovery through social media, with the result that more people behave in a positive way towards the websites is a much better and more accurate picture of a website’s true value.