Article Marketing

Understanding Article Marketing

Getting high quality incoming links to your website is likely to help to improve the rankings of your web pages in the search engine results for certain key phrases. One of the best things you can do to help attract visitors, attract incoming links, and increase the likelihood of conversion is to make sure that you produce plenty of high quality content. This ‘content’ doesn’t need to be focused on just your website(s) but can be e.g. on a blog, on forums at other domains etc.

Apart from producing the content solely for the marketing and informational benefit of web users, in order for your web pages to really achieve higher search engine rankings, you also need to have one eye on creating and distributing content which is likely to not only attract people to your web pages, but also to make them want to link to those web pages.

Google has given suggestions of the type of high quality content which could win you valuable high quality incoming links.

For example, Google’ s suggestions include using :

article and press release websites / directories.
answering popular and topical questions.
putting details of your own ‘original research’ on your website.
sending out your own newsletters, contributing to social media platforms e.g. Facebook™.
publishing original topical lists e.g. 30 ways to…
creating and regularly updating a blog.
producing informative and free ‘how to / tutorials’.
running a useful and free service on the website e.g. ...quoting / calculating / estimating / converting engines.
adding (good) free downloads.
adding videos / links to You Tube videos.

The suggestion of using article directories is a legitimate way of getting links which could benefit your web pages in terms of potentially increasing the Google PageRank™ and hopefully improving the position of the pages in the Search Engine Results.

How It Works

Article Marketing can essentially assist ‘off page / off site’ search engine optimisation, as well as creating a degree of credibility for the author.

This Internet marketing tactic involves you writing articles about your business which incorporate important key phrases that you would like your web pages to rank more highly for.

The articles are then submitted to specialised article websites for distribution, publication and syndication. Many of these article websites allow free submissions. Links back to your own web pages can be included within the articles themselves or in the bio box / resource box underneath the article. Key phrases which are valuable to whichever web pages you are trying to promote in the search engines are used in the ‘anchor text’ of the links in the article and resource box.

The term ‘anchor text’ refers to the actual text contained in a link / hyperlink.

Incoming links obtained via articles should ideally be ‘high quality’ links according to what is known of Google’s preferred type of link.

A high quality link consists essentially of 4 main things:

The link should come from a page which features mainly related subject matter.
The incoming link itself should contain a key phrase in the anchor text which strongly relates to the subject matter and key phrases in the page within your website that it is linking to.
The incoming link should come from a page which has a few other outgoing links on it as possible.
The incoming link should come from a page which has at least a reasonable Google PageRank™ itself.

Articles submitted to article websites / article directories will be published in page of their own within that website / directory. If the article website has a good PageRank™, then the initial incoming links that you create through article marketing could correspond strongly with the characteristics of high quality incoming links mentioned above.

After the initial submission and link from the directory itself, wider distribution of the article through the directory network can lead to traffic being directed to your web pages, some more potentially high quality ‘natural’ incoming links, and improved perceptions of the author (you), your company and it’s products services e.g. greater credibility and helping to establish ‘expert status’ in your market.

Other Considerations

There are however some important points to bear in mind about this marketing tactic to create links:

In the first instance this is a more ‘manufactured’ and highly controlled way of creating incoming links your web pages. The 2-stage idea of first attracting visitors to the content and then hoping that they will provide a link to it could possibly happen at a later date after the initial link from the article directory has been provided.
Article directories vary in quality and some article directories may be less likely to produce a traceable link through to your web pages. There does need to be some initial desk research to establish the target article directories.
Writing and submitting articles is a time consuming process with no guarantees as to the number or the quality of the incoming links that may be generated.
PageRank™ should not be the main focus of webmasters. Although getting more high quality incoming links does increase PageRank™, this is not a linear event that can be easily judged and measured. Producing high quality content will always be important.
The ‘quality’ of the incoming links to your web pages should always be of uppermost importance, not the quantity (unless it is a quantity of high quality incoming links).

Article marketing is one of a range of tactics which could be used in combination to achieve better results in search engine rankings and in the minds of potential customers and customers.