There are certain sets of skills and knowledge that are a part of any job.  This pertains to writing for article marketing as well as it is for any profession.

In another article I’ll offer some of the specific skill sets involved in professional article writing.  I want to concentrate this article, in fairly broad terms, on the necessary knowledge sets.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is at the heart of any article marketing.  You not doubt recognize that SEO is a very complex notion, 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.)  With a broad stroke, I can offer some basic guidelines, but do not consider them rules that must be followed in every situation.  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.

Duplication of Content: If you are contracted to write multiple articles pertaining to the same keyword or small keyword list, you must make sure that the articles are sufficiently unique that the search engines will recognize them as different content.    At first, the search engine may list multiple identical content, however over time the search robots will classify the duplicate content as redundant and stop indexing all but one of the versions.  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.

A good article marketing writer should also be familiar with a concept called article spinning and useful software for article marketing, in addition to being mindful of SEO guidelines.  Article spinning is nothing more than providing alternative words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs throughout the original article.  The software’s function is to randomly select from the available alternatives.  While the process of preparing an article for spinning is quite time consuming, it is a highly effective way of generating unique versions of the same article.  In the end, it is faster than writing more articles from scratch.