No matter what your profession, you can identify a set of skills and a set of knowledge that are prerequisites for performing the task properly.  This is as true of writing for the purpose of article marketing as it is for a neurosurgeon.

I’ll leave the particular skill sets necessary for someone who offers professional article writing for marketing purposes for another time.  In this short piece, I want to use this article to suggest what such a writer needs to know.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is at the heart of any article marketing.  I’m sure you realize that SEO is a very complex field in its own write, and it changes frequently as the search engines are continually refining their algorithms to try to deliver ever improving results for users.  However, we can keep the list of SEO variables that apply specifically to a writer to a manageably short list.

Use of Keywords: Nobody can tell you a true magic number of times a keyword should be used in an article.  If someone tells you that you must include a keyword four to six percent of the time, that person is simply wrong.  (Of course, if that person is your client, it may be advisable to pretend that she or he is correct.)  But here are a few generalizations about keyword use that work:  1) It is helpful for the keyword, or at least part of a long tail key phrase, to be included in the article title.  2)  It is best if the keyword appears in the first paragraph of the article.  The second paragraph is the deepest into the article you should go before the keyword or key phrase should make its first appearance in the article’s body.  3) You should avoid using any keyword more that ten percent of the time in the article. 4) You should not ever try to use an article to search engine optimize for more than three variations of a keyword.

Content Duplication: Make certain that your articles are sufficiently different from each other, if you are assigned to write more that one article for the same keyword or short keyword list.  Otherwise search engines may see them as the same content.  When that occurs, one one of the articles will remain in the search engine’s index.    It may take a while for the search robot to recognize the similarity, especially if the duplication appears on different sites, but eventually one of more of the major search engines will consider one of the articles as redundant information and only list the other in any results.  At a website, dupecop.com, there is a free tool available that will compare up to four articles to score the uniqueness of each against the others.  They also sell a version of the same software that can check up to twenty five articles at a time, as long as they are in .txt format.

In addition to that limited understanding of SEO, a good article marketing writer should also be familiar with a process called article spinning.  Content spinning is simply providing alternatives for segments of the article.  The segments might be individual words, groups of words, phrases, sentences or even complete paragraphs.  After the many variations are written and properly coded, they are then entered into article marketing software that randomly selects from the various alternatives.  The type of software is called a spinner.