Article content is important, but if you do not take the time to conduct proper keyword research, nobody will be able to find it.

I have a question for you. Are you getting quality traffic to your articles? If your article has some stellar content but you do not take the time to make it keyword rich, who is going to find it?

When most people hear the term keywords, the first thing they think of is pay-per-click advertising or old pre-web 2.0 use of meta tags.  But since Google started scanning web site content for relevancy, keywords within the web page itself has become critical for successful ranking in search results.  For video marketing, keywords are necessary for the description, tags, and header or title.

For article marketing, keyword research is necessary for both title and content.  The title must contain your entire targeted long tail keyword, a grouping of 3 or more words that are popular, but are not over saturated and over competitive.  A long tail keyword that has less than 300,000 page results in a Google search is ideal.  Now that’s for unquoted.  When you surround your keyword with quotes, the search results need to be less than 50,000 to give you a good shot at top placement based on your content.

For example, the keyword "home business", even surrounded by quotes, is over saturated with 16 million search results making it very difficult to get your article in the first page of Google search results, let alone the first hundred.  Now try the long tail keyword "building a home based business on a budget" and surround it with quotes.  Now you are only dealing with 18,000 search results, which is a lot less competitive.

Another suggestion for your title is to break it up into what the search engine likes to see and what the human eye likes to see.  If you prefix the example long tail keyword with "5 Keys to" or "3 Tips on", you will capture the reader’s attention.  Pair reader friendly and search engine friendly phrases together and you will have a title that is both searchable and clickable.  For example, putting them together and you get something like "3 Tips on Building a Home Based Business on a Budget".  Get the idea?

Now within your article, the entire long-tail keyword should appear 2 – 5 times, and especially once in the opening paragraph.  Search engines eat this stuff up.  Don’t go too nuts by making the keywords seemed forced in your article.  Confusing your prospects is not desirable.

Where to go for research?  You can use Google’s free keyword tool within your AdWords account.  You can use Wordtracker’s free keyword tool at freekeywords.wordtracker.com.  Or just type in "free keyword research tool" in your favorite search engine and pick one.  Remember, you want a long-tail keyword that has been entered in the search engines a lot in the past month but it’s quoted entry in the search engines return less than 50,000 page references.

Making your articles searchable will expose a lot more prospects to your message.  No go do your keyword research before submitting your next article.  You can learn more about article marketing by watching Video 3 Phase 2 in my free social media marketing course at TheSocialMediaMarketingGuide.com.