If you want people to listen to your answer, you need to know what they are asking.

This phrase seems quite backward as we rarely provide an answer before some one has asked a question.

Writing an article however tries to answer the question before the reader has asked it. When writing anything you are preempting what the reader is going to ask and then you try and phrase your information around the question, even if this process is subconscious.

The internet has become a place for adding articles and has given many people a place where they can write, share information and answer questions before they are asked.

If you would like people to read your writing, you at least need to identify what the question you are going to address is. If your article rambles and has no relevance to a readers question they will stop reading.

On the internet it is possible to do question research. It is easy to do this research if you consider the keywords people are typing in on the various search engines as the questions they are asking.

If we classify internet users into two categories,

1. browsers
2. hunters

it is easier to identify what type of questions the internet searcher is going to be asking.

An internet user that is browsing is searching for something, however what they are looking for is not necessarily understood or quantifiable if you asked them. The hunter on the other hand knows exactly what they are looking for and will use specific words that they believe best represents what they are trying to find.

For example if I was looking for “Indian chicken recipe” you can be pretty sure that what I am after is a recipe that contains chicken and is of an Indian flavor or curry. However if I typed in “recipe” I could be looking for almost any type of recipe, it may not even been food related it could be a “recipe for a disaster.

This identifying key phrases for an internet article is very important. It allows the writer to address the topic correctly. It also allows the search engines to categories the article correctly, which is vital if you want your article to be found for a question that an internet searcher is asking.

When someone types in a long phrase like “Indian chicken recipe” this is known as long tail. A short phrase like “recipe” is known as a short tail phrase. When considering all the phrases typed into the search engines there are many more short tail phrases then long tail phrases.

If you are targeting a long tail phrase you will probably get less hits but the people that come looking at the article or content that you have written and posted will be qualified or more interested in what you have to say. When targeting short tail phrases your spread of area is much larger and the proportion of users who won’t be interested in what you have to say will probably be much greater.

So when writing content for an internet site or an article, define the question, define the scope. Are you going to get specific or targeted? Once you have decided these things the article will be much easier to write and easier for the search engines to classify. And then people will listen to what you have to say.