Adding search engine optimization, or SEO, elements when writing your online articles can increase their chances of success --- especially if you're writing articles to help you make money online. Writing articles for passive income is something a lot of people are doing. There are many websites that will publish your articles and share revenue with you when those articles become popular and begin generating some money.

Some article sites are popular enough that it's worthwhile to post your articles just for the exposure they'll get and in some other cases, webmasters promote the site in exchange for your high quality article and then when revenue is generated, you can get paid share of that revenue in the form of Google revenue or a fee for page impressions generated. This compensates the site owner for hosting your article as well as their marketing efforts and rewards you for writing high quality articles.

How do you get search engines to notice those articles?

By learning a bit about search engine optimization and optimizing your article for relevant keywords in your niche, you can increase the chances of that article getting indexed high on the list of search engine findings in a particular category. Google, MSN / Bing, and Yahoo all use different algorithms to help them determine how to index web pages but they all look at keywords in the article as one of those factors. By choosing strong keywords and placing them strategically in your article, you're telling search engines that your article is highly relevant to the article topic and this can result in more people seeing your article when they type in their keyword phrase.

When submitting articles to passive income sites or to article directories, high quality is the first priority. After you've written your article, try optimizing it after that so that you know you've got a solid piece of writing first. Then, you can tweak and edit the article for search engines so that you can increase your chances of success and organic traffic.

After you've optimized it, consider promoting the article as well. You can submit it to directories, add links to your article in your blogs and other articles, and you can use life streaming tools like Twitter and Friendfeed or bookmarking tools like StumbleUpon and Mixx so that you can increase the potential exposure for your writing and improve the SEO as well. Every site that lets you submit a link and categorize what you've written increases your chance of getting that article noticed by people and by search engines.

Writing for passive income or for article marketing purposes can both be profitable endeavors and this is especially the case when you use a proven SEO writing method that gets you results.