I had an interesting conversation on a forum the other night about the ranking of articles by the search engines. Some people were saying that they had great success and were on the top of Google and others were saying that no matter what they did they could not rank their articles at all. It was then suggested that some articles were shown and this is where things got interesting.

The articles that appeared to be ranking well were targeting keywords that should have been quite hard to rank for as they had a few thousand searches a month and there was a lot of competition. The articles with low search or termite keywords with not much competition were nowhere to be found in either Google or Yahoo.

When analysing the different articles further it was mentioned that one had a lot more stop words than the other and that this was probably causing the difference in search engine rankings.  Both articles had around 450 words in content so should have been considered by the search engines as quality content but on further investigation it showed that the better ranking article had less stop words than the other.

The article that was not ranking even though the keywords that were being targeted were low competition had almost 300 of these stop words in the content.  What this meant was that a majority of this article was ignored by the search engines and the words that were not were just single and long tail keywords.  This then meant that the article looked as though it was keyword stuffed and to Google and Yahoo this automatically raised an alarm and was therefore virtually ignored.

The other article on the other hand, even though it had over 200 of these words that get ignored had been formatted in a totally different way.  What the author of this article had done was to use semantically related keywords so keeping the quality and relevancy of his article.  This gave Google the content that it wanted and was therefore rewarded with a top search engine ranking for this article.

If you have any comments on this please leave them below

A common misconception  is that when writing articles you should warm up your reader and have them in presell mood for when they click on your link.  This unfortunately could not be further from the truth.  Most people when they are searching for things on the internet are normally looking for information first, so this is what the content of your article should be about.  If you seriously want your prospective reader to take your article seriously then try to write as though they are your best friend. This is something that I learnt as a member of Article Production as well as many other tips. 

The way you want to structure your article is to answer a question that they may be asking but in a way where the only way that they can get the answer is by clicking through to your site. What you must not do however is send them directly to a sales page as this is a sure fire way of losing them from ever reading any of your articles again.   You want to appear as though all you are trying to do is help them to solve their problem and not just trying to sell them something.

Although the above is normally the case there will be times when you should send people directly to a sales page or an affiliate link.  The time to do this is when your article is promoting what is known as a buying keyword.  With these keywords you know that your reader is in a buying mood and you can presell to your hearts content.

If you are serious about writing quality articles and are looking to make a living on the internet with them, then you should get advice from people in the know.  Article Productions does this and more for you, so i recommend that you chesk this out today. Even if you decide not to join the membership site  just sign up for the free forum as the information that you get there will be better than a lot of the paid information out there.