Whether you're writing a  web article for a passive income site like Askables or for your own website, optimizing it for search engines with SEO writing techniques will help you get more organic traffic to that article. More traffic can equal more success and profit. Continue reading to learn some simple tricks for attracting search engines to your articles.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (or optimisation, depending on where you live), equates to doing things that you know will increase the chances of search engines indexing your article.  By choosing keywords / phrases to focus on, you can ensure that search engines relate your article to a specific topic. This means that when someone searches Google, Bing, or Yahoo for that phrase, they'll find your written content. 

Search engines work based on rules and one of the big rules is that words = relevancy. Use words relevant to your topic in a strategic way and you can increase your chances of being listed in the search engine as relevant to your topic.  When writing articles for passive income, keyword optimization will also equate to relevant advertisements displaying on the page and those ads can equate to £ €, or $ (aka: money in your pocket). By carefully strategizing, you can drive traffic to your articles and that traffic could make you money.

Here are tips to optimize your articles for SEO:

• Research keywords. A great way to find keywords related to your topic is to do a Google Tilde search like this: keyword~ . The bold words are considered "related". Also look at the bottom of the search engine results page for words listed as "related searches". http://kwmap.net is also a good tool.


• Decide on a primary keyword. Use that word in your title, near the beginning of your article, somewhere in the middle and then again in the last paragraph.
  
   


• Sprinkle related keywords from your research throughout the article.


• Keyword anchor a keyword and point it in the article to a source that provides more information. If you're allowed to use anchor text in the body of your article, point it to your website. You can also point to an 'authority' website such as Wikipedia or a site ending in .edu to boost the article's relevancy.


• Write articles with bite-sized paragraphs. Use bullets and subheadings. Bold your subheadings and ensure every paragraph has words that relate to your primary keyword.
  
   


• Add tags and relevant categories where possible to make it easier for search engines to categorize your article.


• Add relevant pictures and name them with keywords.

By following the above SEO guidelines when writing articles or website content, you'll make it easy for search engines to decide what your article is about. By doing that, you're going to also get more relevant advertisements on the page as well as traffic that wants to read what you've written. When your ads relate well to your topic, it's natural for visitors to click those ads and that can make your article writing efforts more profitable.

Additional Article Writing Tips:

-Go for quality over keywords every time. Don't make keywords the priority because a poorly written article won't get you results---regardless of the keyword density.  Strive for a keyword density below 3% (no more than three uses of a keyword per 100 words).

-Provide helpful articles but don't forget to leave something to the imagination. Your aim with article writing for passive income is to pique the reader's curiousity so that they'll be compelled to learn more through the ads and links on the page.

-Promote your articles by social bookmarking, creating links that point TO your articles, and by using social networking tools as well.