• By Neeraj Varma
• Published 04/19/2011
• Article Writing

Your plan to attract more readers to your article needs to be in two parts. The first part has to appeal to humans. The second part has to appeal to robots. In reality, attracting robots is more important than attracting humans when you are doing article marketing online. This is because if your article doesn’t get the attention of the search engine robots nobody is going to see your article. It won’t show up when people do a Google search. The problem is that when you write for the search engine robots it is a turn-off for humans. The rules of writing for search engines involve including the keywords in the headline, the first 90 characters of your lead sentence, the last sentence in your article and in about 2% to 4% of the article content. Writing to attract search engine robots is mostly about keywords. You focus on one keyword and its variations (LSI). That’s how you get the search engines to send traffic to your article. On the other hand, once you start writing your article you may find that it is difficult to include the exact keyword in the headline. Or, if you include the keywords in the headline it doesn’t make for an interesting headline. The same conflict between writing for humans and robots applies throughout the article. When you are writing to attract more readers to your article of the human variety the goals are totally different. In order to attract the attention of humans you need to write an interesting headline.

Ted Nicholas, the “6 billion dollar” copywriter has researched the subject of headlines extensively

. He has broken down the exact formula to use when trying to attract humans to your article or sales letter. The following are Ted’s headline “blueprints”. You would be wise to use them as often as possible when crafting a headline: 1. How to… 2. Secrets of… 3. Stack Benefits 4. Problem/Solution 5. How to/Guaranteed 6. Get Benefit Fast, Regardless… 7. Solve a Problem… 8. Visualize it… 9. Ways To/Reasons Why… 10. Problem Solver… 11. If…Then… Attracting more readers to your article of the human variety is 90 percent about the headline. Attracting more readers to your article of the search engine kind is 70 percent about the keywords you choose and how you use them in the article. Somehow, as a writer, you need to find a way to please both. If you write strictly for the search engines the article will be so uncomfortable for humans to read that they won’t bother with it. If you write strictly for humans very few humans will ever see it, no matter how well you have written, because search engines won’t know who to show the article to. In my opinion, you just have to write good quality articles for humans with a little bit of attention to the search engine optimization. If you write enough good articles for humans, you will attract the attention of the search engines because humans will pass the article around the Internet and to each other. The search engines will notice that the url of your article is being passed around and they will start giving your article more importance.

It’s a more long-term strategy, but if you provide good value for humans you will attract more readers to your articles by far, over a span of time.