Writing, Keywords and Search Engine Optimisation

When you are stuck for ideas for the next article or are having a severe case of writers block then revisiting old articles can at least keep your writing mind active and can also yield new and fresh ideas.

Revisiting an old article is also very useful if you depend on article views for revenue or for increasing traffic to your blog or website. It is also a great exercise in discovering where you were in your mind as you look back and also on how, perhaps, your writing style has changed over the weeks, months or years. What was an important issue to you at the time may not be as important any more. Looking back can also reveal how far you have come as a person, especially if you have been writing motivational articles or describing events that you have been through personally.

So let us assume that you have some articles that are not doing so well. They are not receiving much traffic or received a lot at the beginning but the interest has died down.

As a start you can always check your spelling again. This may sound obvious yet I have come across old articles that either I had forgotten to spell check or had spell checked without reading the context. "Friend" and "fiend" are both spelled correctly so will not be picked up by the spell checker!

If the article is not getting many visitors then try and rewrite the title. Make sure that your important keywords are included in the title so that they can be picked up by search engines. Keywords within the body of the article are also vital for search engine optimization and so checking keyword density is another valuable exercise. If your article is all about "dog training" and those keywords do not feature that much within your article or even your title, then you will have problems being discovered.

It is also good to revisit the structure of your article. Do you have a good opening paragraph, for example and does the article finish in mid-air or does it have a good conclusion? Article restructuring is great for earlier articles as you have progressed and developed as a writer and now have a better feel for your own style and what works.

The use of a keyword tool is a great help for article writing. Copying and pasting your article into the checker will reveal the keywords relating to your article and thus can show you how your article could be discovered by a search engine. The ideal is to have a visitor discover you through a phrase that they entered into a search engine. Looking back at how you article is structured can therefore reveal the likelihood of this happening.

Sometimes, of course, an article just does not do as well as you would like. However, do not give up on it immediately. A new keyword rich title, new keywords in the body and perhaps a restructuring could elevate it to the top of the pile.