I'm confused about the first sentence of articles...

Could it be that SEO people want the keywords first, but that marketers don't care as much?

yea for seo purposes they say include your target keyword at the beginning of your article,but sometimes it's not logical too,or the person is established and doesn't need to seo his article to get views.

include keywords when you can - most importantly, create curiosity and interest to keep the reader engaged and moving forward to the next paragraph

What you want to do is make sure that your title is at least 4 words long and includes a verb. Also make it catchy and attention grabbing with keyword/keyword phrases included.

for the first sentience I like to make a question with my keyword that people want answered, also try to tell them something like your going to tell them a big secret later in the article, it will make them read the whole way threw! Better chance for a click threw, hope this helps.

If you are writing naturally, your articles will automatically contain the necessary keywords to cover you. Worrying about stuffing them all in the first couple of words or sentences can result in some pretty inane literature. Search engines will recognize much more than the first 11 words - I think it's around 250 or somewhere around that. There's a lot of keywords that can turn up in that many naturally written sentences.

Each author has their own style. Loading keywords into an initial statement isn't always the best way to capture a reader's attention - and in the long run there is no use in writing an article if it doesn't capture any reader's interests. What happens if you get an article on page one of google because of all the keywords, but nobody reads enough of the article to make it worth your while to write and post it? Nothing. What happens if you post an article on a submission site and nobody is interested in it enough to use it for their own site, blog, or newsletter? You have one backlink. A lot of work for one link.

You want to always aim your article to get enough reader interest to guide them through the article to your links - and make them want to click that link. If your keywords don't show up in the first sentence it's not much of an issue. If you don't get clicks from it, it's a huge issue.

I think the whole issue of keywords in articles itself has been blown out of proportion by people trying to sell marketing info products. A lot of bad writing has resulted.

I've never read anything about using your keywords just in the first paragraph of the article. What I have read over & over again about article writing is that you should definitely use the main keywords in the Title of the paragraph (very important) and also throughout the body of the article, this way the search engines will pick it up & display it as relevant content when someone is searching for those keywords.

To your success,

Giselle

I guess where i got the idea was from Jakob Nielson World's Best Headlines: BBC News (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox) and related articles by same, he says sentences should be front loaded, not for seo but because people wont read so far into the sentence without seeing the keywords, I trust you guys more though because you all are in the trenches every day

For the most part, people read an article based on the title. Very few people will read the title of an article, become interested enough to begin reading the article, but then quit after the fourth word because the same keyword that was in the title hasn't been repeated yet.

Use great titles.
Write great content.
See great results.

Hi,

I've heard that it is good to try to get your keyword in the first paragraph somewhere, but it doesn't have to be the first sentence, it can be at the very end as well as the title, body and concluding paragraph. Sometimes my keyword is a bit obscure and I simply can't fit it in, but most times it is easy enough to fit in.

So I say 4 times in the article including title.

Cheers.

I don't focus on google's ranking as much as I do on readership. I use keywords in the title and once or twice in the body but I write from the heart, not from the pocket aspect. If people like what you write they will click to your site and you will get ranked in SE's.

Have a read of some articles in EA and you will see which ones you prefer to read.

God bless

Norma