1. Few people will contact you directly without seeing your web page first. At that point, people just aren't motivated enough. All they know about you is that they liked an article you wrote.
2. Search engines rank web pages in part based on "link popularity" i.e., number, quality, and relevance of links to a website. You may not care about search engines now, but if you ever do in future you will be pretty upset at having wasted all these opportunities for link popularity.

Blunder Number 3: Not including an HTML-formatted link with "anchor text" in your ezine article's author's resource box

As much as reasonably possible, you want to encourage publishers to publish your author's resource box with link in HTML, using your chosen anchor text (i.e., text you click on to follow link, traditionally displayed in blue and underlined), if it's going to be shown in a web page or HTML newsletter. If article is being distributed as plain text, you can include a link to an HTML-formatted version on your website. There are three reasons for this:

1. A link that says "discover widgets" is going to get more clicks than a link that just says "http://www.widgets.com" Your call to action (e.g., "discover widgets") is much more powerful when reader can read it and act upon it in one split second, since there is not that crucial extra split-second of pause while moving mouse. In that split-second pause your reader might get second thoughts. With advertising (and author's resource box is an advertisement), impulse is everything.
2. Anchor text, like bulleted lists, boldface text, headlines and subheadings, has a higher chance of being read than rest of text. People tend to scan computer screens rather than read text word for word. Eyes will be much more likely to slow down from scan mode and actually read anything that stands out from page, especially hyperlinks. This phenomenon and psychological power of putting a call to action in anchor text together mean well-written anchor text might easily double click-throughs you get on your author's resource box link in HTML newsletters and web pages.
3. A web page will rank higher for a keyword in search engine results if anchor text of links to that page has that keyword.

Blunder Number 4: Only including an HTML-formatted link with "anchor text"

You really want that anchor-text link, but it is foolish only to provide that link. No matter what you do, a substantial number of publishers will reformat your article as plain text, and your link will simply disappear. That's why you need to have both an HTML link with anchor text and a URL written out in this format: http://www.yoururl.com/page

"But I'm only interested in getting my article on web pages so I can gain link popularity," you say. Well, a large number of plain-text email newsletters will be archived on website of newsletter publisher. These newsletter-publisher webmasters won't usually remember at that point to get your HTML version to post online. The standard approach is just to automatically convert URL to a link using special software.

Remember: publisher may be operating dozens of ezines and websites, so this whole step will be partially or completely automated, without anyone stopping to check for an HTML version. If you don't have a URL written out in your article, that link will simply be lost.

Besides, think of all traffic you might have gotten from plain-text newsletter readers. Who would say no to free targeted traffic--isn't that why you want to rank high in search engines in first place?

In fact, with paid online advertising going for more than a dollar a click on average, you really are throwing money away if you make any of these ezine article marketing and advertising blunders.

About the author
Joel Walsh is the head writer of UpMarket Content (http://www.upmarketcontent.com). Visit upmarketcontent.com to promote your website with professionally written ezine articles

As a website copywriter, I hear this myth repeated back to me all time by new clients and prospects. "Don't bother search-engine-optimizing content," they say. "Just make sure it is well written and keywords will flow naturally into content." Self-styled gurus constantly repeat, "don’t write for search engines, write for people who will be reading what you write"--as if there were necessarily a conflict of interest between SEO and humans.

If you're one of people who says that, you're operating under two misconceptions:

• Misconception 1: you know more about what people want to read on web than search engines do.
• Misconception 2: you know more about both search engine optimization and what people want to read on web than people who making a living out of this stuff.

Search engines know more about your website visitors than you do

"I want a well-written web page, not a list of keywords." It frightens me a bit when I hear this, since it demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of both SEO and what search engines do.

A search engine is not simply a massive find function, like one in "Edit" menu of Microsoft applications. It does not just pull up any page that has keyword in it X number of times. If it did, all pages that show up on search engine results would simply contain a list of keywords. You see, you're not only one who would like to rank high in search engines. If there were an easy trick to do it that didn't involve expending resources on good content, you would have been beaten to punch.

Ultimately, writing for search engines means writing for web surfers. Think about it: services like Google thrive on giving people pages they want to read. If they consistently failed to give people what they wanted, people would stop using them.

Writing what people want to read on web

Most of time, people don't want to read on web. Reading on a screen hurts eyes. It doesn't help that a lot of web pages make it harder with text that's too small, backgrounds that are colored rather than white, and lots of extraneous graphics. Besides, an unfortunate amount of what’s on web isn’t worth reading, and there is an overabundance of choice. Time must be rationed.

In fact, people treat a web page much as a search engine does: they scan it. In particular, they scan it for keywords they entered into search engine. If they arrived via a link from another website, they are still looking for keywords related to their interest--which are generally same as keywords people enter into search engines.

In short, Nobel-prize-winning literature makes bad web content. You have to write specifically for web. That's why web hasn't fueled much of a resurgence in short story or other literary writing, dashing many hopes. Ebook versions of paper books have also disappointed expectations. Newspapers are only paper publications that have made a smooth online transition, precisely because they are written to be scanned rather than read word-for-word.

Still think good SEO web content makes for bad reading?

You've just read almost to end of a piece of search-engine-optimized web content. This article was optimized for keywords, "SEO," "search engine," "search engines," "keyword," "keywords," "search engine optimization," and "writing."

The keywords were present in headings and throughout content. The content itself is easy to scan: paragraphs of one-three sentences, broken up by sub-headings every four paragraphs or so, and keywords in boldface.

Naturally, those keywords are too competitive for this page to have a chance of ranking high in Google for them. But they will help with all atypical search keywords that account for as many as half of all searches. So, if someone types in a phrase like, "keyword writing search engine optimized content," this page would have a pretty good chance of showing up.

To be sure, this article is on long side for a web page. Most people won’t even scan more than 600 words of text; 300-500 is ideal. But this article is destined primarily to be shown in an email newsletter, where attention spans are longer since people are more confident source of content can be trusted to repay their investment of time. Besides, as a well-structured page, it can be split into two or three pages according to subheadings.

In short, there’s much more to writing well for web than just writing well. If you’ve had enough sense to have your web content written professionally, have enough sense to take advice of most website copywriters: search-engine-optimization for keywords and good web writing are same thing.

About the author
Joel Walsh is the head website copywriter for UpMarket Content. He suggests you visit this web page to get SEO website content copywriting services or information: http://upmarketcontent.com/seo-content.htm