martinibuster - 12:43 am on May 25, 2011 (gmt 0)

seeing as ehow articles come from multiple authors , do they have a system for ensuring the published articles are SE optimised ?

Yes. The topics themselves are mined from known search queries and assigned by their algorithm. Demand Media has a style guide their writers are required to follow. Their style guide isn't public although it wouldn't be surprising if it's out there somewhere. Their blog hints at their methodology. Here is a snippet [demandstudios.com]:

Examples: Bad: How to Make Homemade Cards for the Christmas Holiday Good: How to Make Christmas Cards ...Successful titles are based on the most search engine-friendly way to phrase the question.

Here is an article by someone who signed up to be a demand media writer [readwriteweb.com].

The stories are usually how-to pieces, often broken into steps. They're evergreen, designed to be as relevant in a year or two as they are now. They're the kinds of questions I would usually get answered through a phone call to my contractor father, or my brother the car genius, or my mother the seamstress/cook/homemaker/gardener/early computer geek. You can tell by the assignment headlines that they're generated from search engine queries...

As I posted earlier, Demand Media is an extreme model of this kind of article writing. My concept is to simply be aware of the Go Words and be sure to have them in there. It is the most basic advice, it must have been on Google's Webmaster Help section years ago. But judging by my competition this is a real weakness for many sites.

Circling back to links, people looking for citations (for links/twitter/facebook/word of mouth) will find it in Google and link to it.