I know that you are suppose to write articles with appropriate keywords but how many do you put in and how do you do it so the article is still worth reading but still gets you a fairly high rank.

It is more of an art than a science the most important place for your keywords is the title which search engines weight more heavily. The rest of the article you have to be careful about placing keywords throughout the document because some search engines would consider it spamming. There are some tools (google key word density) which will help you determine your keyword densitry ratio - good luck

I think other than writing the headline to catch the attention of the reader and of the search engines, I think you should write an article for the articles sake and not try to write an article to get a bunch of keywords in it. Ultimately if you provide value in your article it will be used and reference more often and get you further traffic.

Common mistake is to write article for the keyword purposes. The keywords will not increase the page rank. You need a few good links from other web sites in order to build good page rank.

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Thanks for your insight it appears my initial assumptions were wrong - good thing I posted the question!