Tuesday, February 17, 2009

The Power of Article Marketing - Improve Search Engine Rankings

Article marketing is the most powerful tool I have in my arsenal of online marketing tactics. I've used article marketing to significantly improve my search engine rankings. I guess the world has caught on. The concept of article marketing has really gained momentum during the last few years and is a widely practiced discipline. As webmasters learned more about SEO and search engine optimization drivers, quality content has risen to the top.


If you have yet to jump on the article marketing bandwagon, then I suggest that you get started right away. Article marketing is here to stay. So you do not have to be all that concerned that others are using article marketing as well. In fact, article marketing works no matter how many people use it.

The reason why article marketing is so effective is because you are doing two things that create value for your site and search engines. The first is that you are producing keyword focused content that can drive interest to your website, products, and services. Additionally, you imbed links back to your website. These in bound links are powerful tools for search engine dominance.

When you distribute your article to article sites, blogs, or partner websites, your content gets additional exposure. As your content ages, and links are included back to your website, you benefit from the Google page rank associated with that page and your in bound link.

One error I see made all too often is when individuals, new to article marketing, is that they forget to include a link back to their website or simply link in the wrong way. The proper way to develop in bound links is with keyword rich link text. What this means is that your link is displayed with your keyword not the traditional http.

If you are unaware of how to produce such a link, do a Google search on create html links. You will find dozens of websites that give you the html code you need to create links in the proper way. If you do not embed your keyword in your link text, you are wasting your precious time and effort in article marketing.

After writing your articles and imbedding links using the proper format, the next step is to distribute them on sites that have a high Google PR and are popular for article aggregation and or distribution. I used to believe that the benefit of these article distribution sites were that they served as a resource for webmasters seeking content. The truth however is that it is the site’s Google PR itself that provides the value.

Many of these online article sites do not distribute content at all. In fact, the percentage of individuals copying content and pasting it on their site correctly is fairly limited. That said, if you focus on the top sites you derive most of your value from getting your articles posted on their website.

Create articles in your niche and structure them correctly. Your links in the author box or imbedded in the article must use your keywords in the anchor text. Test all of your links to make sure they work properly. Once you have validated that everything is working properly, distribute your articles to the top article directories.

I personally recommend Article Submitter Pro and Bryxen Article Submitter

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