If you have owned a website for more than about ten minutes, you will have heard that writing ezine articles is the best way to increase traffic to your website. Every webmaster wants to get increased website traffic and, if that traffic is both free and targeted, it is a webmaster's dream come true.

How, you might ask, will writing ezine articles increase traffic to your website? Writing articles works in two ways: having articles published online creates links back to your website, thereby improving your site's placement in search engine rankings, and people who read your articles and find them interesting will visit your website.

There is a little bit of science you need to use if your ezine articles are going to successfully increase traffic to your website. The science is all about the use of keywords, and the term "keyword" includes phrases consisting of several words. You can write a brilliant article but, if you choose your keywords unwisely, that article will not achieve all it might in terms of increased website traffic. The truth is that a mediocre, or even downright badly written, article with properly used keywords will work better than a good article with poor use of keywords.

Choosing keywords requires a bit of research. What you need to find are keywords that real people use when they use search engines to look for things, but which don't have too much competition from other articles already published online. Finding keywords people search on is easy, finding keywords with little competition is easy; finding keywords that have both attributes is a bit harder, but it has to be done.

The point of writing ezine articles is to increase traffic to your website, so there is no point in basing your article on keywords nobody (or hardly anybody) ever searches for, but if you choose a keyword that's searched heavily, the competition will be too great. If you pick a highly popular keyword, high ranking websites will already be holding the top spots in the search engines and your article will be buried so deeply in the search results that nobody will ever see it.

Remember that "keyword" can actually mean a phrase. In fact, many of the best keywords are phrases of four words or more, and these are known as "long tail keywords". You can easily demonstrate how this works by typing a few search terms into a free research tool (eg Overture, Wordtracker or Google's keyword tool). Try typing in "dogs", then "German Shepherd", then "white German Shepherd", then "German Shepherd Training". You will see that the first search term "dogs" gets thousands of searches but the number of searches drops dramatically when you start searching under more specific terms.

Once you have a list of long tail keywords that are relevant to your website, the next step is to research the amount of competition for each keyword. The easiest way to do this is to use Google's advanced search feature and type each of your keywords in turn into the exact phrase box. This will tell you how many websites are indexed for that particular keyword. It is often useful to check out the sites appearing highest in the organic search column so you can look at the competition you will be facing.

Keyword research can be quite time-consuming when you first start but, like most things, you will find you speed up with practice. It is tedious work but absolutely essential if you want to make the most of your ezine article writing. If you can find a keyword that gets a reasonable number of searches but has only a few websites listed under that term, you have a chance of getting your article listed high up in the search engines. High search engine placement means more potential visitors will see your article and you will soon notice the increased traffic to your website.