How to Write a Good Article, The Road Less Taken

For anyone here on HubPages wishing to make a few bucks out of writing it is essential to know how to write a good article. Not only for people here on HubPages, but for everyone that has an online business and needs to market it. Writing articles is a great way of driving traffic and building backlinks, but an ugly fact is that more and more people are writing and submitting articles to gain backlinks than to actually offer something and with the intent of driving free traffic. So that leads to one thing, low quality content that is all around the net.

I think that people don’t understand or underestimate the power of a single article and how much traffic it can generate if the content is good and well targeted. A pointless article that serves as a backlink will not drive much traffic, and if the article isn’t good the placement in the SERP will also be low, the traffic that article gets will be low and the backlink will not have much value. So again, there is a great need to write high quality content articles, so I’ll give you the road less taken, a different approach to how to write a good article.

The average writer will make a complicated mess out of writing an article, while in fact it is a simple process. And why is writing such a complicated matter for most writers? Because most writers don’t have a clue what they are writing about, research is the mother of article writing, why people fail to do their research is beyond my comprehension. The other reason is that most of the writers don’t feel like they have authority to say something with conviction. I stand behind my words, if nothing else at least that gives me feedback and new opinions, which means traffic and returning users. So don’t be afraid to state your own opinion when writing an article.

In my experience, over 90% of the articles I read are full of nothing, you get a 500 word article where the writer beats around the bush on some topic and fails to deliver anything of value! Again, do your research and you will avoid making this mistake. This is the problem with keyword writing, most writers focus so much on the keyword placement instead of trying to write a good article. So my suggestion is to write an article about whatever topic you are writing and once you finish it you can add a few keywords in the first and last paragraph, I would suggest using LSI keywords in the body.

The article needs to flow, so basically the article needs to be a story that reads well. If you are writing an article around a specific keyword you will miss a story and provide a bunch of useless information about your keyword that most of the time makes no sense and provides absolutely nothing. Like I already said, write an article about a topic of your choice and try to make it count, once you read it you will see that there are plenty of LSI keywords in it, and of course if you are not satisfied you can add a few once you finish. Why is this good?

While most article writers will focus on a single keyword and go for the 2%-3% keyword density I boldly state that this is not the best way. Let’s look at the importance of LSI keywords and their placement in your articles. A keyword is used to tell the search engines what your article, page, website is all about. So providing one keyword over and over should do the trick, right? Well yes, but you will get a better result if you use a family of LSI keywords. If you place 3 or 5 LSI keywords in your article you will be telling the search engines that your article is more related to the subject than you could with one single keyword, this is a fact.

To sum it up, when people read articles they are looking for information, so that is what you need to provide them. Beating around the bush in 500 words will get you nowhere. Make your article a story that can be read easily and provide some valuable info, that will make your article worth something. People would want to read it, the traffic will increase and search engines will notice that and give you a better ranking, also the backlink will have more value.

This is not an actual how to write a good article Hub, I didn’t provide a checklist of things, this is real input on what counts. I can tell you to place your keyword in the article title, the first and the last sentence, try to keep 2% keyword density, utilize 3 to 5 LSI keywords and make bullet points, but that is like building an article writing software. Information here provided is truthful and comes from my long experience. No article format or instructions will actually tell you how to write a good article, especially not the ones that give you precise instructions; after all, you have to want to write a good article.

I know that a Hub with the title How to Write a Good Article isn’t supposed to confuse you, but I did mention in the title that this is a road less taken, which is an unfortunate truth. I have faith that with search engines enhancing algorithms every writer will be forced to write high quality content instead of writing fluff and spinning thus creating an article worthy of a 5 year old. In the end, this is just my cry out for support to the few real writers here on Hubs that know what I am talking about. High quality content rules!