As discussed earlier title is the most import thing in a article.
Title should be a gooding heading and with in 100 character.
Then summary should be descriptive and up 300 character .
Then body should well arranged and gramatical error free. It should be written in such a way that a visitor should get some important information form it.
At last in author resource put your website address, contact address etc.
An article equipped with the above points will be a quality article.
It’s definitely worth cramming an article into a 300 word max or cutting your reader off to meet this arbitrary limit. Do this and get the title perfect and that’s a good article.
Oh, hang-on a minute… there is no formula for a good article.
A title is as long as it needs to be, the content too - a good article is one that gets read lots. A good title helps attract a reader but it’s not the most vital thing. A 250/300 word limit is arbitrary - a good article is as long as it needs to be. Concise is not the same as short. The topic is critical, personality and writing style too. Writing for the reader is the key - the ‘best written’ article will fail if no one wants to read it.
Asking questions and answering them will also work great.
Something like:
Are you tired from the prices of gas? Convert your car into electric now. And so on
Length is not as important as everyone is making it seem to be. Grab your reader with a attractive title (info specific, funny, alluring, whatever seems most appropriate). Next, efficiently write your article. It doesn’t matter if its 200 or 1000 words as long as it covers the necessary content. Make sure, and this is perhaps the most important thing, that you write for a specific audience. This will really determine the length and style of your article.
Very well put. I believe a major part of the problem is that too many people are writing for the web and not caring a rat’s tail about their readers… just how to get visitors for their AdSense, Affiliate sites. Writing that sells is written to pander explicitly to the reader’s interests. In order to do that, you have to care about their aspirations, their objectives, and their needs.
A quality article should entice the reader to read on from the first paragraph… A good indication of this is to get non-theme-intended readers to sample your article… and if they read on, even though the topic is not relevant to their interests, your on to a winner…
You must respect your reader… find an ideal balance between humour and point making… and only write about what you know…
I think…?! 
Good headings x long about blah, good first paragraphs, length x words… People sure do read and regurgitate the same “How to write” book advice over and over.
And has anyone seen the wee back button on a browser? If you’re writing for the web then the reader can abandon at every syllable, every word, every sentence, every paragraph.
Follow the ‘rules’ by all means, but you can’t be creative or find your own style if you follow. Writing is easy - it’s figuring out what people want to read that’s the trickier part.
Grammar and spelling are two ESSENTIALS. For example: I have a directory site that also accepts articles. This morning I rejected 2 articles because they bordered on being incoherent. One was writing as though they had been doing an IRC chat or a forum post or something: “bcause ur” etc… and the other was almost as incomprehensible. “You are needing to lose fats…” Unfortunately spellcheck alone is NOT enough. Proofread and have someone else proofread.
So, poor grammar/spelling are probably the top reasons I would reject an article someone had submitted to me. Those are the easy things that will make your article worthless.
As for what TO do after you’ve mastered the grammar and spelling. KNOW your audience. If you’re perceived audience is astrophysicists there’s no reason NOT to use technical jargon. Just make sure you use THEIR technical jargon… If you’re explaining astrophysics to someone off the street, then try to “translate”.
The simplest model is to have a nice concise topic. Tell in the first paragraph what you’re going to say, then detail it, then summarize what you just said. That’s the “classic” model and it can work quite well.
But please proofread!
Quality content is important if you would like to gain SERP results.
Link building & Link baiting is a positive SEO steps that gives you better rankings in the search engines like Google.
Make the article for human eyes - not only for search engines.
Certainly true if you are writing to a specific audience. But on the Internet, you never know who might be reading. Maybe you’re writing about pocket bikes. Your audience could be a kid looking for the latest models or a mom or dad looking for a birthday or xmas gift. Those parents could be lawyers, brain surgeon, small business owners, factory workers, retail clerks, etc. How do you write for them all?
The key to writing a quality article that anyone can read is to know your subject thoroughly and write directly to your readers as if you were talking to them. Keep your content interesting, fresh, and informative so that the brain surgeon, the homemaker, and their kids find and understand the information you are serving. Don’t use technical terms that only the “in crowd” understands, but don’t “talk down” or oversimplify too much. If you can explain your subject to either a rocket scientist or a sixth grader and still get your point across, then you have a quality article.
I don’t think enough emphasis has been put on audience. With an audience in mind, it becomes easier and easier to break these other “rules” of article writing. Sometimes an audience might require longer or shorter articles. Maybe they want a serious article, or maybe they want humor. Let your audience be your inspiration. If you aren’t writing for one, don’t be upset if no one wants to read your article.
Excellent point. I was thinking along the same lines as I read through the replies. With the Internet you never really know. Targeting specific audience is effective when writing for, let’s say print, and you have a definite demographic already in mind. This makes writing easier as the topic becomes almost conversational. But with a broad audience the risk of sounding too high and mighty or too simple is big. Finding the right balance between the two makes a quality article.
It all starts with the title, how else would you grab a reader? Hit two birds with one stone: use a catchy title, and try your best to insert your targeted keywords in it.
Title should be desciptive and short.
Summery of the article should be related to title.
First para graph of the article should carry complete subject of the article.
Body of the article should descriptive information about the theme.
Conclusion should be according to the first paragraph.
Author resource should be clearly mentioned.
Combining all the above steps makes a better article.
You definitely need to understand that article writing is less about article writing and more about drama. So if you look at screenplays, you get an idea of what you should be doing.
Many articles are simply boring.
They’re boring because few understand that to get the attention of the reader, you must first snap them out of whatever they’re dreaming of, and then get them to pay attention to your article.
This is best done by the concept called the first fifty words.
The first fifty words aren’t the first fifty words you write. They’re actually found somewhere deeper in your article. You need to pull them up and give them prominence. Think of this as the middle of a story that’s pulled to the front, and then the story rolls in sequence.
So instead of the Goldilocks story running like this: Once upon a time… it’s more like this: Goldilocks wasn’t a big fan of porridge. And today Goldilocks was madder than ever. Because… (and you continue the article).
Here’s an article or two that may help.
psychotactics.com/how-to-jolt-your-reader-into-paying-attention
In regards to Internet Marketing… an effective article is as follows:
1- Keyword rich title, presenting the question or problem.
2- 300-400 words, with keyword density around once every 100 words
3- Should flow into the solution to the problem at around the half way point
4- Lead reader to the resource box at the end, which funnels the traffic to destination
Hey all,
My criteria is to make it simple yet crisp.
The title can be formal or casual, depending on who is your target audience. As trainers we are always taught to judge who you are writing for!!
Cheers
SPRITE
In regards to Internet Marketing… an effective article is as follows:
1- Keyword rich title, presenting the question or problem.
2- 300-400 words, with keyword density around once every 100 words
3- Should flow into the solution to the problem at around the half way point
4- Lead reader to the resource box at the end, which funnels the traffic to destination
It will be better if the article is more than 500 words, because many article directories accept minimum 500 words.
This is a great summary list. I’d add to that
5- A catchy lead paragraph. If it doesn’t get reader’s attention right away it probably never will.
The criteria for high-quality text vary with the form of the material. What is critical for a news article may not be at all important for a sales letter and not particularly relevant for a description of a new widget. Few of us have the opportunity or the funds to hire focus groups to bounce ideas off of, so we often fly blind simply guessing whether we’re meeting our audience’s needs and expectation.
It might be helpful if you studied some sources that you read regularly or that you admire for some other reason for their quality. Try to discover what it is about their structure that you can adopt. For example, journalism students are taught to use an upside down pyramid for writing news articles, where the most important ideas are expressed in the title and first paragraph and the remaining text becomes less and less important. In that way, if the reader only gets through the first paragraph or two, they have covered the greatest points the writer has tried to get across.
Obituaries, recipes, editorials, press releases, announcements of grand openings, and Nigerian inheritance letters all can, in their own way, be effective. And they each have a fairly standard structure that can be duplicated successfully with entirely new content.