To help some of those writers I’ve decided today’s post should focus on one of the most basic rules to writing effective copy, AIDA.

Attention  – This is what headlines are for.In the past there’s been a lot of focus on keyword usage in titles online–and with good reason because search engines placed a lot of weight in headlines with keywords.

But search engines are finally catching up to the traditional practices of good copywriting, and basing more and more search indexing results on LSI (latent symantic indexing), which means online marketers have the freedom to produce attention grabbing headlines just like in the print world without having to strain over forcing their keywords into the title.

Search engines placing importance on LSI aren’t looking for (or limited to) keywords in titles as much as they’re looking to find clusters of related words and terms in the full body content. This means that in theory they should be doing a better job of indexing content, and writers can do a better job of writing effective copy–which starts with an attention grabbing title.

Interest -  Once you grab a reader’s attention you’ve got just a few seconds to convince them to read your full article. Your opening pararaph needs to describe what your article is about, and define why the reader wants to read on.

Desire -  Once you’ve got the reader past your opening statement it’s time to build their desire in whatever you’re promoting. No matter if it’s a product, service, web site or idea–your article has a purpose of spreading some message and just stating that message isn’t very useful, you want your readers to believe your message and desire the results your message promises.

Action -  Here’s where the author’s resource box links are used, however once again there has been a focus on keyword stuffing these links for search engine bots rather than using them effectively as “calls to action” for your readers.

You’ve gotten your reader’s attention, raised their interest and built desire for results, use this space wisely to provide a clear and easy path to getting those results for your human readers.

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You may have heard all of this before, but we thought it worth mentioning again–even as a reminder–because we watch the results of every article in our directory and I can tell you that the writers who focus on their human readers rather than search engine bots with their copy are getting far more clicks to their links.

We understand that many web masters use articles for link building and want to appeal to search engines with their copy, but let me ask you this; at the end of the day are  search engine bots or targeted human visitors going to support your business?

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