In this video, Rich Currie will introduce you to using a list of keywords as you write content for your website. This is part of a series, so in this part he assumes you’ve already done some research and have compiled a list of good keywords.

A good article length is between 600 to 900 words. In this article, you should focus on one keyword instead of dumping a ton of keywords together. Focus makes it easy for Google to figure out the subject of your article. If you try to saturate your writing with a grab bag of loosely related keywords, your ranking will suffer because the search engines won’t be able to determine the main niche idea.

To stand the best chance at ranking well in the search engines, your article should be original content. Rich talks about the perils of duplicate content and even says to avoid material from Ezine Articles. I disagree with him here. Duplicate content is a problem if the duplication is happening on your own site.

There doesn’t appear to be a duplicate content penalty between sites. In other words, there could be an identical article that is posted on two or three sites and all three could be indexed and ranked on page one of Google. I’ve seen it happen over and over. But if you post identical articles on your own site, then one of those pages will probably be penalized within Google.

Having said that, original content should be your first choice. Use syndicated content to supplement your original work.

Also, as you’re doing research and synthesizing a new article from other people’s work, be sure to give proper credit when including direct quotes. And run your article through Copyscape to check on possible duplication. (This concern for duplication is different from worrying about the duplicate content penalty. Here, you’re writing your own original content. When you do that, you want to avoid accusations of plagiarism.)