Article Marketing Guide
How to get the best from Article Marketing
Article marketing can be one of the most effective ways to increase traffic to a site and depending how it is managed it can cost less than other methods such a paid advertising. When you submit articles to an article directory you not only get free exposure for a site but you can greatly increase the search engine results listing for that site by creating quality backlinks.
One of the key factors that will determine how high up in the SERPs or Search Engine Results Pages a web page is listed is the number of inbound links to that page. Using article marketing techniques, you can create as many inbound links as you can also ensure that the content in which the link is placed is relevant to your site which will give the link more ‘authority’ in the eyes of the search.
You can use article directories purely for the purpose of creating backlinks and submit articles regularly to every article directory which you can find. This strategy will delivery predictable results very quickly and is not very complicated. You don’t need to worry about the quality of the content as much and there are software programs that will submit articles to thousands of article directories automatically so it does not have to take up all that much time.
You can also use article directories more in the way that it was intended to be used which might take more time and effort but will deliver a greater number of benefits in the long run. The purpose of an article directory is to provide free content to anyone who wants to update their blog, website or email marketing campaign on a regular basis. In return the author gets to promote a web page by including a link to it in the text or in a resource box which also includes some information about the author.
If you spend time building up your reputation on an article directory by creating quality content for you article marketing you will not only create more trust in the sites that you are promoting but you will also get more exposure because some directories rate their authors and articles and give preference to the better ones. This can even increase the PageRank of the article and thereby the PageRank of the site that it is linked to.
PageRank is a designation used by Google to determine the ‘importance’ of a page and is measured from PR N/A to PR10. It is determined to a large degree by the number of inbound links to a page as well as the PageRank from where they originate. It is only a partial factor in how high a web page will feature in search results but it still has an influence.
The way in which a page appears in to a search engine will also influence PageRank and optimal use of key words and grammatical correctness will be favored. If the page on the article directory is reposted its PageRank can also increase which improves its influence as a link but also its appearance in search results.
Because article marketing content is keyword optimized and each article directory has its own interest to promoting all of their pages online you can’t ignore the amount of organic traffic you might be able to get when the articles appear in search results. If you submit articles which are interesting, helpful and easy to read they will also be referred, recommended or reposted more often. It is likely that you will then get a lot of traffic from a targeted audience who would have been interested in the topic of the article.
Just by creating quality content for an article directory you can strengthen your article marketing campaign a multiple of times. If you submit articles which then become popular then the links to your site will be seen a lot more often but at the same time the articles will appear higher up in search results. The more often the articles show up in search results the more likely they are to be reposted. It can take longer to reach this stage than if you just post a lot of articles as often as possible but in the end you can get ongoing benefits without having to put extra effort in.
Another useful aspect to article marketing is that you can submit articles with a range of different keyword combinations. Unlike a website which can only have the content written once you can experiment with many different key word combinations and track which ones get the best search results. You also multiply the chances that anything related to your site will appear in search results every time you submit articles. Rather than having one website that people can search for you can create literally dozens or hundreds of pages that will direct traffic to the page you want to promote.
You don’t need to create your own content for article marketing. If you are not a good writer or if you don’t have the time to write you can write you can hire an SEO writer but the content has to be original and submitted as your own work. It is possible to submit the same article to more than one article directory but then there is a possibility that search engines will only index the first copy of the content that they find. Articles can be spun so that they are not recognized as duplicate content but the more times they are spun the less likely that is to work.
If you plan to submit articles to more than one article directory on a regular basis then it might be worthwhile to invest in software to submit articles. There are also websites which will charge you every time they submit articles to each article directory for you and others which charge a yearly fee to do the same. It’s also very useful to get stats on keyword usage for article marketing and there are many free programs which are quite useful for this purpose.
