But whilst the recommendation is to write in the active voice rather than the passive voice, what exactly does this mean in real, practical terms which are easy to understand? Let me explain the difference, using examples, and hopefully it should be easy to see why the passive voice should be avoided where possible, and replaced instead by the active voice.

In order to understand both the active and passive voice it’s important to understand a basic principle of grammar – the difference between the object and the subject in a sentence. Basically the object is having something done to it, whereas the subject is the person doing the action. Let’s see a couple of examples:

• Example 1: John kissed Jane.

Here John is the one doing the action, so he is the subject. Jane is the one to whom the action is being done, and so she is the object.

• Example 2: The tree fell on the car.

In this case the tree is the one doing the action, and so is the subject. The car is the one on the receiving end of that action, and so is the object.

Remember: Subjects subject objects to actions.

Once you understand this principle of grammar, it’s then fairly easy to understand the difference between the active and passive voices.

When using the active voice you make sure that the subject of the sentence is the one doing the action. You can see in both of the examples above, this is exactly what’s happening, and it makes sense.

So what’s the passive voice then? In sentences written in the passive voice the object is effectively promoted to the rank of subject. In other words, the sentence is no longer about what the subject is doing, but about what is happening to the object.

Let me clarify by re-writing those two examples above using the passive voice:

• Example 1: Jane was kissed by John

You see here that the sentence is clearly about what is happening to Jane, even though Jane isn’t actively doing anything.

• Example 2: The car was fallen on by the tree.

Again, this sentence is focussing on what’s happening to the car, even though the car didn’t do anything.

Effectively there are two main problems with writing web content in the passive voice. First of all, it’s longwinded and sometimes difficult to follow easily. Writing for the web means writing for an audience which is constantly one mouse click away from dumping you for your competitor. You simply can’t afford to be confusing or convoluted.

The second problem is that it seems as though nothing is really happening. We don’t bond with the subject of the sentence, or feel actively part of the scene. If a tree crashes down on top of a car we can see it clearly, and perhaps even hear the crunching and smashing of the metal, wood and glass. But if we say that ‘the car was fallen on by the tree’ we tend to visualise a much weaker scene which doesn’t have the same effect at all, and doesn’t grab our attention. Visually it’s a picture quickly dismissed and forgotten.

So when writing web content such as SEO articles it’s important to make sure that you write using the active voice. Think about what you are writing about, identify the subjects of your sentences and make sure that they’re the ones taking action.

Remember, the ground doesn’t get fallen on – people fall. Cups of coffee don’t get drunk, people drink them, and hyperlinks don’t get clicked, people click them.

Whilst enjoying a quick Wagon Wheel moment earlier I got thinking about how good quality SEO articles, blog posts and even web pages should all be more like those biscuits. And no, I’m not talking about trying to encourage customers to lick their monitors. Let me explain.

A good article or web page should have something instantly appealing – something sweet to entice the reader in. Perhaps an intriguing opening statement, an appealing title, an attention grabbing image, a thought provoking question or even a provocative statement designed to raise eyebrows. This is the chocolate layer. It should surround the article or blog post, providing something highly appealing early on in order to make sure that any passing visitor doesn’t overlook the inner loveliness and head for a plain old Rich Tea instead.

But a chocolate layer, however lovely, needs something rather more substantial underneath. This is the biscuit layer. This is what gives the whole thing body, and something to get your teeth into. A well written blog post or SEO article needs to include something really substantial, something which will get people thinking and actively considering the ideas. Perhaps this could be a new way of looking at something, a new approach, a new technique or methodology, new advice or new information about a recent development. It has to be meaningful, and provide a purpose, a base on which the whole of the text rests.

Then comes the mallow. This is the soft squishy bit which binds the biscuit and the chocolate. It’s the stuff that sticks to your teeth, and which you find yourself absent mindedly reaching for with your tongue twenty minutes later. Its the sticky stuff which hangs around long after the biscuit is finished. It’s the memorable quotation, the astonishing statistic or the startling comparison. It may not be the main focus of the article or blog post, but it’s the bit people remember.

By making sure you include a sticky point in your article or post which people will remember you also increase the likelihood that they will recall the rest of your article, and think about it even after the wrapper is in the bin, or the web page has been closed.

Of course, a good SEO article should also be quite unlike a Wagon Wheel, because it’s no good if it melts in the sun, gets broken in half or eaten by the dog.

In the past it was very much the case that most article writers were producing content predominantly aimed at the search engines. This involved creating content which included an abundance of keywords, the aim of which was to appeal to silicon based life forms rather than carbon based ones.

Fortunately this changed some time ago, with quality very much being the order of the day, and with keyword stuffing not only no longer effective, but actually likely to result in sites being blacklisted. But as with anything in the world of SEO, things keep moving, and the increased focus on personalisation has meant that article marketers yet again need to step up to the plate and deliver content which has a slightly different focus.

The reason for this is that whilst we have long been focussing on quality content, it is now more important than ever to ensure that our content instigates certain user behaviours. This may include sharing, bookmarking, tweeting, sending to Facebook, Liking, Google+ing and so on. By getting quality content shared in this way not only is traffic likely to grow, but the status of our content and its value in the eyes of the search engines is magnified.

In fact to a certain extent we’ve almost come full circle. Having moved away from appealing to the search engines to appealing more to real users, we’ve now started to move back towards creating content which appeals to the search engines again, the difference being though that this time we’re using real users to achieve this.

By creating quality content we moved away from churning out the dire drivel we all know and try to forget. But now it needs to be more than just quality content. Today SEO article writers need to be delivering content which addresses a specific need, answers clear questions, adds directly to some understanding and provides a concise, complete and valuable resource which encourages people to bookmark and share it.

In essence then, it’s important to make sure you know what your audience needs, and what sort of questions they’re asking before you begin writing the answers. Don’t tell people what it is they need to know, find out what they want to know, and provide the answers to them. And how do you find out what people want to know?

The answer is obvious – from the very same platforms you’re hoping your content will be shared through. Using social media to find out what people are asking, discussing and having difficulty with is the best way of making sure that social media works with you once your content is out there.

Today I’m going to share a quick tip with you for quickly grabbing a list of questions people are asking right now in relation to your keywords.

Twitter offers one very real advantage to the article marketer because it offers real time results relating to your specific niche. All you have to do is find those people who are asking the questions.

You almost certainly already know how to search on Twitter, by entering your keyword in the search box. But what many people don’t realise is that there are key features unique to Twitter’s search engine which offer a real advantage to the article writer who is looking for questions people are asking in relation to the keyword or topic.

Let’s say that you’re writing an article about cooking and recipes. You could search Twitter for ‘recipe’ but the chances are high that what you’ll end up with are results which may not include very many questions. So after the word ‘recipe’ type a space, and then a question mark, as in ‘recipe ?‘ The question mark is a little known operator which means that your search results will be filtered to include only those tweets which include both the keyword ‘recipe’ and a question mark, signifying a question.

Although this is a very valuable technique there is a problem, because what you may very well end up with are tweets which are there to market other sites. These will typically include links and URLs in them, so what we can do is to filter out any tweets which include a link. We can do this by typing ‘-filter:links’. This filters out any tweets which contain links, and so our final search query looks like this: ‘recipe? -filter:links‘. This will provide you with a list of all recent tweets containing the word recipe as part of a question, but which is not directly marketing another website. You can save this search to in order to save time in future.

By using Twitter in this way you can more easily come up with ideas for new articles which actually help to address real questions and problems people are having right now.

Of course, once you’ve written and published your article don’t forget to link to it on Twitter, and send a tweet or direct message over to those people who were asking the question.

But one of the most common reasons for this problem is that all too often article writers try to come up with answers, without really thinking too much about the question.

Oh, there’ll invent a question, and probably either include it in the article title or the first sentence – perhaps both. But that’s the problem – they’re inventing questions.

If you’re struggling to come up with new questions and topics for your SEO articles or blog posts why not make it easier on yourself and simply use one of the questions that’s actually being asked by real people?

It’s easy to find this out by searching online, reading blog comments and browsing relevant forums. Not only can this provide real inspiration for your writing, but you’re helping to address those issues people are actually having, rather than the ones you’re inventing. And when you stop to think about, isn’t that really what we SEO writers should be doing anyway?

If this is how you feel about article writing and creating SEO content then either you’re in the wrong business, or you’re making my job a great deal easier, because my articles will be out-performing yours by such a huge factor you may as well not be writing any at all. Titles are one of the most critical parts of any SEO article, and for several good reasons.

First of all, the majority of articles in article directories are discovered by those looking for information through the search engines. A keyword search will result in a great long list of possible results – often thousands or even millions of them. The most visually striking element within the search results listings are the titles. These are either the titles of the web pages, or the titles of the articles.

This means that the first thing anyone is likely to see is the title of your article. If it stands out and looks interesting and relevant then perhaps some people might glance down at the couple of lines underneath it, which will generally be taken from your summary or teaser section. Only if this seems relevant will people click on the link and read your article. This means that if you fail with your title, then your entire article fails, because no one will click on the link.

The same is true for those people who find your article by browsing a list of recently published articles on any particular directory, or a list of recent blog posts. There’s simply too much information on the web for people to give seemingly irrelevant or uninteresting content much more than a cursory glance. If you don’t capture their interest immediately, someone else will.

Titles are also a key part of the whole search engine optimisation process, because the search engines will often use the title to determine the contextual relevance of the article. It’s generally agreed that having your keyword or keyphrase towards the beginning of your article works best, giving your article the best chance of being picked up and indexed quickly for the right keywords.

Titles need to be optimised for both the search engines and real people. Fail to spend enough time and effort on your titles and you could lose both, leaving you with a whole page of words nobody’s ever going to see.

If you’re writing an article as content for your website, or as a service to deliver useful information to be people, or as part of a newsletter distributing information to subscribers, then your article needs to be exactly long enough for you to make your point. Clearly providing an article not long to explain yourself is of little value, and waffling on for ages after you’ve made your point is a waste of people’s time. Write an article, make your point, stop.

However, what many people ask is how long an SEO article should be. My initial answer is simply that it should be the same length as it takes to make your point. Why should SEO articles be any different? If you’re covering a complex subject then stopping at 400 words is unlikely to enable you to explain the topic adequately.

Similarly writing 1,000 words on a fairly easy to understand point is likely to put people off reading your articles in future – that’s if anyone actually made it to the end of your first article to find out who the author was.

But what we’re really talking about here is how much content is best to give the search engines a fighting chance of picking up on your article and considering it relevant enough to the topic to list it prominently in the search results pages.

One of the most important things to consider when writing high quality SEO articles and web content is to ensure that your vocabulary is as broadly relevant to the subject as possible, as it is the subject specific vocabulary which is going to help the search engines apply their Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) process to determine the context and likely relevance of the content.

Therefore if you write a 1,000 piece but use very little subject relevant language you may find that it has less impact and success than a 500 word article which packs a good deal of contextually relevant vocabulary into every paragraph.

No, I’m not talking about keywords – just subject relevant vocabulary which any good writer would use when covering a topic. For example, read this article again carefully and see if you can pick out just how many words relate to writing, articles, web content development, search engines and online business marketing.

Very few of them are repeated much, but they’re all there, and this article is only a little over 500 words. 500-700 is the sweet spot, but a word count alone is never enough. Make sure you use a broad and highly relevant vocabulary, and you’ll have a perfect recipe.

Clearly a basic description of the product may well prove to be lacking in inspiration, so although you may have to briefly refer to its physical appearance, properties or attributes, the main focus of your article needs to take a more original approach. If the subject is ‘dull’, then the approach needs to compensate for that. So what approaches can SEO articles writers take that will help spice up subjects as scintillating as men’s knee length woollen socks?

The first technique is to tell a story. This could be a first person account of an event or a humorous description of a situation someone you know found themselves in. The product needs to feature within the story in a prominent, and positive way, but the story itself should be humorous, engaging and reasonably believable.

It’s difficult to give specific examples because of course everyone’s style of writing is different, and the product will restrict the kind of story that can be used. But perhaps if the subject was wallpaper paste you could describe a friend who tried to economise, and made up his own paste, with somewhat disastrous consequences (perhaps the wallpaper peeled off and landed in the soup just as the mother-in-law was about to start eating, or the hapless DIY enthusiast managed to get himself glued to the wall.)

Another approach is to take an opposite view from that which might be expected. So, as an example, if faced with an article about ice scrapers for car windscreens, you could suggest that you consider them a total waste of money, suggesting innovative and bizarre alternatives such as strapping half a dozen hot water bottles all over the windscreen or bolting a kettle to the roof of the car to collect and boil rainwater that can then be released across all the windows. By taking a novel and ridiculous view like this you’re effectively making it clear how good the product is, but in a way that’s more likely to get people to read.

The problem is that dull subjects aren’t just difficult for article writers to write about, they’re also difficult to read. People just don’t want to read an article about socks, ping pong balls or ice scrapers – unless their interest is quickly gained through the use of a quirky, surprising or humorous title that’s quickly followed up by a summary and first paragraph that keeps the interest going.

By using either of these two example approaches it’s perfectly possible to actually have fun as an article writer creating SEO content on less interesting subjects and, more importantly, creating content that’s more likely to be read, enjoyed, shared and which results in a boost in traffic and sales.

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Bing currently holds over 7% of the search market – that’s several billion searches a month, and if you’re above the crease on page one you can be pretty confident that you’ll be enjoying a high number of hits. So how are professional content writing services optimising content for Bing?

Optimising for Bing necessarily involves some overlap with the methods you’re currently employing in order to optimise for Google. But the overlapped segments of your optimisation strategy are not enough to make it with Bing. To dominate within Microsoft’s search engine you have to pull out a few extra stops.

Firstly, your exiting SEO strategy probably focuses heavily on creating high quality back links. However, Bing rewards site developers who have a less selfish attitude, and are more egalitarian. This means that professional content writing services are now introducing high quality links to external sites within their own content. Including a few links to reputable sites such as Microsoft, Wikipedia and the BBC implies that the content is rather better researched, and therefore more reliable. This is one way in which you can boost your ranking on Bing, but it’s not the only way.

Bing has recently announced that as part of their analysis of sites’ relevance they are going to be taking into account the behaviour of people. One of the specific ways Microsoft has cited they’ll do this is by monitoring the use of the ‘Back’ button in the browser. If a user types in a particular keyphrase, and your website is listed high up the search results for that keyphrase, the user is likely to click the link.

However, if they hit the ‘Back’ button fairly soon afterwards, and return to the search results, Bing will identify that behaviour as implying that your website was not relevant for that search query, and demote the listing. So having plenty of high ranking external links as well as high quality content is still not enough. Now that content has to engage with users in a way that will significantly reduce the chance of a single page bounce returning people to the search results.

Professional content writing services are achieving this by creating a regular stream of new, fresh content, ensuring that the content is highly relevant and engaging, and structuring it in a way that encourages visitors to click internal links. This approach, in addition to traditional SEO techniques, low keyword density, broad subject sensitive vocabulary and use of headings, sub-headings and solid coding all adds up to an approach which is seeing some dramatic results for businesses making the effort to engage with the several billion people passing through Bing every month.

A tremendous number of SEO article writers have a simple format when it comes to creating a summary that’s really focussed on getting the reader to click the link and go on to read the full article: copy and paste the first sentence or two of the article.

Although in many cases this may work, it isn’t the best strategy, especially when most article writers focus on their main keyphrase within the first sentence, rather than on creating a catchy, enticing and engaging summary for the readers. The problem really stems from a perception of focus, or a misperception of focus.

Whilst the first few sentences within an SEO article are pretty important ones in terms of search engine optimisation, the summary is much less important in this regard. The summary is usually what’s seen in either the search results listings, or the listing on the article directory. It’s prime purpose is to capture the attention and interest of the reader, because unless this is achieved, the article will remain unread, and your links fairly worthless.

So what is the best approach when creating an article summary that will ensure your audience wants to read more of what you have written? One of the easiest ways of starting to think about how to approach this is to imagine you’re in a pub sitting round a table with half a dozen of your friends, sharing gossip. Suddenly a story hits you that you want to tell them, but everyone’s keen to have their but of gossip heard. So what do you do?

You make a short, simple statement that you know will whet their appetite, get everyone else to shut up, and leave them hanging on your every word. It’s something most of us know how to do, and it’s a skill we use when it suits us. Writing SEO articles and developing an effective summary should be approached in the same way. Except that your audience isn’t sitting round a table at a pub with a drink in hand and a readiness to listen to your gossip. Your online audience is much harder to convince, and so you have to work hard to gain their attention.

One of the most important points to appreciate is that you must know who your audience is, and what they’re looking for. Knowing what someone is looking for means that you can shock them, surprise them or intrigue them more easily. Again, back at the pub your tactic would be much less successful were it not for the fact that you knew your friends would be interested in that particular type of gossip. If your audience is likely to be looking for information on how to do something a little better, surprise them by suggesting that their approach is wrong, or that their hopes are about to be realised.

But then there is another important rule – make sure you deliver on your promise. It’s no good shocking or surprising someone with a stunning summary only to let them down when it comes to the article itself. You must make sure that your article delivers as promised.

When it comes to writing summaries I tend to wait until I have written the article completely. After all, how can you summarise something that hasn’t been written yet? Once I have written my article I think again about who my audience is, what they’re looking for and why they’re likely to have clicked the link that brought them to my article. Then I think about a way of phrasing my summary that will intrigue them quickly and effectively, without giving away the answer.

This is the final rule – don’t summarise your article in the summary. Okay, so I have slightly contradicted myself here, but the thing is that if your title suggests that you’ll describe 3 ways of doing something, and your summary explains those three ways fairly well, no one’s going to bother reading the article itself. Your summary must attract people, intrigue them, but not satisfy their curiosity. That’s what the article should do.

So, to summarise then, the simple format used to get your audience to read your article by creating an effective summary is:

1. Wait until you’ve actually written the article
2. Don’t just copy your first sentence or two
3. Make sure you know who your audience is, and what they’re likely to be looking for
4. Capture their attention quickly by shocking, surprising or intriguing them
5. Don’t summarise the entire article – leave them curious