Target your niche market with savvy articles that will help your SEO (search engine optimization) efforts. Articles can be a great way to drive targeted traffic to your website and garner you valuable inbound links from other websites.

The very first rule of thumb when you are writing articles is to look for information that people would currently have trouble finding within your specialty area.

Start by doing your keyword research. Find out what your target market is interested in first... then focus on SEO.

Using a tool like Wordtracker you can easily put in the query box "how to" + "your area of interest" (e.g., how to, cat). That will bring up questions people are asking in that area, including lots you probably haven't thought of.

Scour message boards and Yahoo Answers to think of more ideas and see how your target audience would put a question together. Then back it up with research to make sure others are in the same thought pattern (searching for it). Target the long-tail keywords (not just the word "cat" but "how do I make cat food".)

So I went ahead and did a quick search in the Keyword Research in Wordtracker with the words "how to" + "cat" and up came a ton of article ideas, like "how to help a cat lose weight," which would be spot on if I sold cat food!  See how easy it is to not only help your SEO efforts, but also create valuable content for your target audience?

Once you've got some good questions with long-tail keywords in them, see what information is already out there. Don't waste time writing an article when thousands of other people already beat you to it. That's not going to help your SEO one bit.

Now if you are not a writer you can go to a service like http://www.elance.com or http://www.guru.com to hire one. There are growing numbers of freelance writers who specialize in writing SEO articles these days.

Make sure to write a very detailed description of what you're looking for and how you want your article optimized. Your first goal of creating articles for SEO is to have a helpful sincere approach. No one wants to read paragraphs and paragraphs stuffed full of the same keyword phrase.

Mention to the writer that you want the keyword phrase in the article title and how many times in the body and what other variations of the phrase can be used. Don't forget to tell them the importance of this article being useful and valuable to your target customer. If all you talk about is the SEO importance of it you will get back a poor quality article that only a search engine may love. If your visitor doesn't read it what's the point?

(For more on hiring a writer, see this article from November.)

For SEO purposes I do strongly suggest doing two different versions of the article: one for your website and one for the article directories. Again -- who would want to post your article up on their website if it's just a mess of keywords!

There are hundreds if not thousands of article directories out there. Focus on the article directories that are directly related to your target/niche market and the top directories. These are my favorites of the top article directories:

http://ezinearticles.com
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.buzzle.com
http://www.isnare.com
http://www.articlealley.com
http://www.articlecity.com
http://www.ideamarketers.com
http://www.articledepot.co.uk

That's the best way to use SEO for targeting your audience with articles.

Nicole Ephgrave