The golden rule to writing articles is to put yourself in your reader's shoes. Your readers don't want to read a 3000 word article, if they wanted to read something that long, they rather read a book. So make your article short, sweet and to the point. A quality well written article is the ultimate viral marketing and name branding tool in your marketing arsenal. Writing articles and submitting it to article directories is by far one of the most effective ways to drive free targeted traffic to your website.

Important note to remember. You're writing articles to please your readers and the search engine spiders. Failing to please both will almost certainly ensure your failure and you'll never see successful results.

My advise to you is this. Learn from the mistakes of other writers, so you yourself won't make that same mistake. Many article writers focus primarily on keywords and getting traffic instead of writing articles with value. Article writing is more of a numbers game, the more articles you write the more likely it is that you will receive traffic to your website. The main thing search engines look for when they index your websites is the amount of unique content you have and how often your content is updated.

I know you've heard this phrase before "more is better." Search engines are smart about this, and will not waste their time to re-index the same site with the same old content. So update your content regularly. Article writing is simple if you follow these five simple steps.

1. Research the keywords you're going to use to write your articles. Use Google's Free Keyword Tool to find your keywords. Other free sources are GoodKeywords, Wordtracker's Free Keyword Research tool, SEO Book. If you have the money to spend check out SEO Elite and Word Trackers Paid Services. After you have acquired you list of keywords, write them down or download them into a CSV file and save on your desktop.

2. Write and eye grabbing unique title/headline and make sure your primary keyword is in the first 90 characters of the title. The closer it is to the front the btter you'll rank. But don't force your keyword into the first position, if it sounds better towards the end then place it there.

3. After creating an eye catching title/headline, you need to write the article body text. Average articles range from 250 words to 700 words. The most articles writers set their articles to be about 350 to about 500 words. Make your body text have at least anywhere from 5 to 10 paragraphs.

4. Write your summary and make sure it has at least three main keywords spread across. A good summary is about 3 to 7 sentences.

5. Submit your optimized content rich article to all major article directories.

That's how easy it is to write articles that will generate traffic to your website or blog.

Another great way of driving and keeping visitors is to offer something of value

Your articles won't generate much traffic online if you're writing about the same things everyone else writing. Try to offer your visitors something of value. Search the internet for free eBooks that you can give away, and/or links to more interesting sites (make sure that the site you're referring your visitors is relevant to your website theme.)

Just a reminder

To be successful in writing articles you must change your writing style. The reason why most article writers fail is because of their writing strategy. They write for one and not the other. Ordinary writers write for either the search engines or they write for readers.

Allow me to explain.

Article writers who write to impress the search engines will fill their articles with keywords not quality content. They're obsessed with trying to manipulate the system that they do not think of the readers they're trying to attract. On the other hand, writers who write for the readers do not optimize their article enough for the search engines to notice them. In simple terms you must write articles that will compliment both search engines and readers.

SO whether you're writing a blog, article or an online magazine, it is important to remember that you're writing for two types of readers. Remembering this will increase not only your website traffic but also your ranking with the search engines.