The best way to market your website is to use keyword articles. Keyword articles are articles with a primary keyword at a density of between 1% and 4% that are posted in article directories. These articles are designed to:
- Build Incoming Links – Each article, when posted, links to your website and potentially improves your page rank over time.
- Generate Hits – Once an article is posted, it may show up in searches for the keyword you targeted, providing you with free clicks from users that view the article.
- Create an Online Presence – Article marketing helps you brand your products and services and starts creating a presence for you online.
While article marketing and keyword articles have a sort of latent benefit (even if your site gets zero hits through the article, they can still build incoming links to help generate future traffic), most marketers hope to see an immediate increase in visitors as a result of these articles.
The Length of Keyword Articles
Often you’ll see SEO gurus tell you that you need your articles to be at minimum 500 words. They claim that Google rewards articles that are over 500 words, because presumably those articles have more depth.
That’s a bogus claim. Google’s algorithm doesn’t care about arbitrary numbers. It cares about the value of content, so well written content will always be more valuable than 500 words of rubbish. But even beyond that, there is a reason that you may not want your keyword articles to be more than 500 words.
Creating a High Click through Rate
The reality is that you don’t care how often someone reads these articles. These articles are not on your website, and a visitor that reads the article in full doesn’t bring you revenue. What you care about is finding visitors that will click the link at the bottom and follow that link to your website. Only by getting these people on your website can you hope to turn them into profitable customers.
So what you need are articles that encourage the reader to click onto your site, and we’ve found that shorter articles do a much better job of this.
Why?
Because human beings are lazy, and often don’t want to spent time reading an article in full. Our best click through rates for all of the articles we’ve posted have always been the articles of about 300 to 400 words, because the readers aren’t reading the articles at all. They read a few words, see the link, click on it, and end up on your website.
Longer articles still do a bit of a better job when it comes to integrating keyword density, but shorter articles are more effective at generating clicks. So at Great Leap Studios, we think the best course of action is to split the difference. We write keyword articles between 400 and 500 words – long enough to make keyword integration more fluid, but short enough that you’re more likely to get clicks. We’re happy to increase the length of keyword articles to a minimum of 500 words, but from our considerable experience, it doesn’t seem like that’s necessary, and may even be counterproductive toward your click through rate and short term success.
