It is extremely important to research your particular market first, and spend some time to find the good keywords relating to your market. By using longer keyword phrases you can eliminate your primary competitors whilst still able to see very good results a lot quicker.

Using long tail keyword phrases?

A longer keyword phrase is a natural expansion of the generic keyword such as "monkey bananas." Longer keyword phrases are usually made up of three or more keyword strings such as; monkey’s love bananas; my monkey stole my bananas, etc. You get the idea.

When you target the longer keyword phrases you effectively capture a smaller slice of the market. Having said this, you will also have less competition which increases your traffic. But no amount of targeting longer keyword phrases will increase your traffic unless you use the correct structure for setting up your article in the first place, specifically for article marketing purposes.

Keyword research is important

If you really want to succeed at article marketing then you need to understand that research is paramount. Unless you research your market from the ground up, you will always be behind your competition. It is worth the time and effort to do this and to do it right.

With the range of keyword research tools on the market doing this right becomes so easy. I always use a couple of FREE software applications.

1. The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is a simple, online keyword research tool to dig into any niche on this planet. Google has primarily the upper hand with search traffic so it makes a lot of sense to use their tool for keyword research.

The best thing about the Google Adwords research tool is that it uses intuitive keyword triggers by suggesting related terms when you do a search.

2. Market Samurai: Market Samurai is another killer keyword tool. This tool cuts the tedious time spent on keyword research into nothing. While the full suite of Market Samurai is not free, the actual keyword research tool is. For article marketing it’s all you need to gain more leverage over your particular market.

Optimise your articles!

The next step in writing great articles is to incorporate your keywords into the articles you write. This is called keyword optimisation. You need to stick by the rules and never go above 1.5 percent keyword density. In reality this relates to using your main keyword 1.5 times for every 100 words you write.

If you were to write an article with this in mind, you’d probably end up writing a really bad example. It’s hard to concentrate on the value of information when you stress about keyword density in the back of your mind. Your article would simply fail to flow that way. Just use the maximum percentage as a guideline and don’t stress about the rest.