As SEO‘s we already know that article marketing is a common method of building those all important one way links back to our pages. It is also used as an efficient method of building relevant traffic. Article marketing and other forms of content distribution can, if done correctly, make a massive contribution to the link acquisition process and guide your pages up the serps. The hope is that people who read these articles will also be interested in your web pages and therefore pushing highly convertible customers to your site.

Article marketing is one of my favourite link building methods and I want to spend a little time in this post showing you how I go about preparing an Article before it is published.

When it comes to article writing you have two simple choices; do it yourself or hire a professional content writer. I always prefer writing the articles myself as I can add my own personality into the content. If you do want to write them yourself I would definitely follow these general tips:-

1) Make sure the first paragraph of your article is focused on what your article is actually about. You need to answer those all important open questions, who, what, where, why and how. Some people like to start their article by creating a problem and then solving it through the article text. Either way the reader needs to know exactly what the article relates to.

2) Before writing make a bullet list of all the points you want to cover within the article. Structure them so they flow well from one point to the next.

3) Try to keep things simple. Not all the readers of your article will be of the same expertise, some may even be complete novices in the area. If you have to use technical terms simply define them to your readers ie SEO (search engine optimisation) is the idea of optimising your site for the major search engines…….. etc

4) Make your format reader friendly by using short paragraphs. I try to keep my paragraphs to 3 – 4 sentences as large bulks of text will put your readers off.

5) Try to back up the points you are making by giving examples of authority or personal experiences. You could use experiences when you have personally solved a problem or your company has. It helps make the article personal and reaches out to the reader.

6) Attempt to put some emphasis on the benefit of your product or service. Try underlining or bold to help readers identify the benefits.

7) Don’t be afraid of sharing relevant resources. Yes this may mean your readers visit other sites but it will ultimately build confidence in you and your company.

Look to others within your niche or industry to give their honest opinion on your article. Ask for feedback or things that would appeal them, that could be added.

9) Make sure the most important aspects of your article are placed nearer the beginning of the text. This is for 2 reasons i) it catches your readers attention early and ii) some editors will only show the first 2 paragraphs of your article.

Ok… we now need to have a little info about the resource box. This is probably the most important part of the article. You need to make sure info about yourself or your company is present as well as a relevant anchored, back link to your page. Don’t overload the resource box with unnecessary links, keep it to around 1-2.

The Common Mistakes

- Grammatical errors, spelling and punctuation are probably the most common errors of all and we all fall short now and again. The problem is that they damage the credibility of the article and will have a dramatic effect on the click through rate of your articles.

- Article marketing is all about setting yourself up as an authority, any hype or bragging, especially if it is untrue will defeat the whole purpose and will yield long term POOR results.

- Try to write about things your readers need, put yourself in their shoes and think about the type of things they may need to know about your industry

- Keep things in the article specific, if it is too broad the reader will soon lose interest and leave the page. You are looking to entice people to your site based on a specific theory, service or product.

- The headline of your article is normally what motivates the potential reader to click. Make it punchy and to the point. Tell people either what you are going to do or ask them a question.

- Do not plagiarize or submit somebody else’s content. Not only is this illegal but it could also damage the site you are linking back to. You need to be particularly careful with this when purchasing content. Use a duplicate content checker to help you filter out any rubbish.

Article marketing in my opinion is still the best method to get your content in front of people and build effective links back to your site. Here are some of my favourite directories.

http://ezinearticles.com/
http://www.webpronews.com/
http://www.ideamarketers.com/
http://www.goarticles.com/
http://www.websitefuel.com/

This list is not complete by a long way and there are thousands more. I personally like to write 2 articles a week and submit them to my top 5 favourite directories.

I hope this helps you with your marketing efforts,

Cheers,

Tim,

We all know that one of the biggest challenges of SEO is link building. We are encouraged by Google to build natural links by creating quality linkable content. This is great if you have a blog as you are constantly up dating your content and adding new and insightful information. You can also inject some personality into a blog which again attracts readers as well as links.

The problem comes if your site is not a blog and is aimed at providing a service or product, maybe you have a store type site and have endless lists of product descriptions and info. How is a page like this ever going to attract any serious links, especially if it is a fairly new site, sure you could start a blog, fill it with information on your products, but how does this differ to what you currently have?

Hooks

What you need to attract external links is a hook, something to give to visitors, something that will make them bookmark your site and hopefully link to your pages. As you can see on this site I provide free SEO tutorials with no quality spared, they are not just basics but they cover a full range of search engine optimisation aspects.

So if you have a service/product site you need to start thinking about a ‘hook’ something for your visitors to come back to and to link to. This hook can be absolutly anything, you only need to look at Amazon and how they do it. What they do is let you read the first few pages of a popular book you might be interested in, it gives you a flavour it helps you decide whether or not to purchase, then what do they do? Hey you can buy it here at the cheapest price.

Another example was a guy in the UK that I worked with who owned an electrical’s site selling, TVs, DVDs, Cameras and all other kinds of electrical goods. We were struggling getting links back to his site, I mean who links to a store? So what we decided on was creating a blog and issuing maintenance tips and specialist ways of taking photographs. We also included product reviews and updates including consumer feedback. You can guess what is coming next… straight after the reviews we referred the visitors to his products.

But the main thing to remember here is that we gave visitors and webmasters something worth linking to, something that added to the visitors experience. In my opinion hooks are an important part of link building and the whole search engine optimisation process.

As an SEO consultant working with a client I always look for ways to integrate quality, link worthy content and this in time will do some of the hard link building work for me

As an SEO consultant I do a lot of reading and one of the things I happened to stumble upon recently was a comment that article marketing is a waste of time. I have a big problem with this comment for 2 reasons.

- It is completely false

- The person who made the comment had 80% of their back links from article directories

Let me tell you this now, article marketing still works, in fact if you analyse the links of any of the top sites you will find that they have used article marketing, directory submissions and reciprocal links, actually a site I was looking at yesterday had 90% of it’s links from various directories and sat at the top of Google in a highly competitive niche.

So these kind of back links work then?

Well unfortunately like anything it is not quite as simple as that. You see just pasting random articles all over the place is never going to give you the search engine optimisation results you want. You have to optimise your articles, press releases and directory listings the same way you optimise you pages.

OK so let me just tell you exactly how I would optimise an article.

1) I would ensure that the article title I was going to write matched the keywords in the title of my page.

2) I would look to link back to my sub domains as well as my home page.

3) Try and make your article over 400 words and include keyword variations within the body.

4) Anchor your back link with the main keywords from that page.

5) Submit it to as many directories as possible.

Remember the ultimate aim for Google optimisation is to keep everything as relevant as possible.

You should structure your press releases and directory submissions in exactly the same way in order to achieve maximum effect.

I think the reason people dismiss article marketing is simply because they do not provide much page rank, this is true but even the lowest ranked article directories provide some link juice.

To look at this strategy in a little more detail I looked into some SEO companies to see how they had built links for their clients. (I can’t name them for legal reasons) I took 2 companies from the UK and 2 from the US and I also looked into one that was based in India.

A familiar pattern could be seen when you looked at testimonial lists. Article marketing, press releases and even one of the companies which was based in India had resorted to comment posting on forums and blogs, which any good search engine optimiser should know, carries very little in terms of link juice.

One thing I did notice was that only one of the companies were publishing quality articles for clients the rest were simply posting various articles on various topics everywhere on the net.

I really wish I could show you the examples but I fear law suits and don’t have the time or funding to fight them.

So if you are doing your own search engine optimisation work, try and follow the rules above when it comes to article marketing, if you are paying a company or an SEO consultant, check your links each month to ensure they are quality and not spammy. (Personally I think this should come in a report each month if your paying, however 80% of other consultants don’t)

Until next time

Tim,

When you are thinking about internet marketing consultants what springs to mind first of all? PPC advertising, seo work, search mareketing, email marketing, linking strategies?

The truth is they all should be part of an internet marketing consultants tool box. The difference between an seo consultant and an internet marketing consultant is that an internet marketing consultant needs to know about the needs of your business, they will need to understand your long term goals and will market you site in multiple ways other than just optimising it for the search spiders.

A good internet marketing consultant in my view should do the following as minimum:-

- They should look first of all the research possible keywords of your site. They should look at competitors and market trends. They should make a list of around 100 possible keywords for you to target.

- Once keywords are in place they should ensure your web pages are fully optimised towards these keywords, they should look at things such as, title tags, meta tags, body content and structure. They should also take in to account any alt tags along with css on your page to ensure everything is structured for excellent optimisation.

- Once your pages are optimised a link building strategy should be put in place and each clients list buildig strategy should differ due to competition, keywords, niche, competition and geography.

- Once this is agreed and in place and if the business is new a PPC program should be looked at to get maximum exposure. I prefer to use adwords as I find it more profitable but other avenues could be explored. A well managed PPC program could reap massive reward.

- A good internet marketing consultant should also discuss, affiliate marketing, email marketing and article marketing all aimed at increasing the visibility of your online business.

Any internet marketing should be ethical as trying to manipulate the search engines will have a serious impact on the long term profitability of your site.

These are just a few of the basics I would want from any internet marketing consultants and I definitley provide all my clients with the above aspects and more.

My first thoughts when starting this site were to make make available affordable search engine optimization.

You see there are many SEO companies out there who specialize in optimization, they promise you a high page rank, and a monthly rate for doing SEO basics, like building links and optimizing content.

In my opinion yes search engine optimization can be affordable but you have to make sure you get the balance between quality and affordability. Let me just explain 2 types of SEO service.

1 – The first type is the cheap type. It will most likely involve overseas SEO work and will consist mainly of content optimisation. I have seen adverts for optimisation as cheap as $25 per page of content. They may also offer to build links for you but never tell you how or what those links are going to be.

Most people stay with these companies for 3 months and then realise they aren’t yeilding results and move on. You see the service may be cheap but the quality of the SEO work is poor.

2 – The second kind of company will be a large company with a massive client portfolio, made up of medium to large online businesses. There quality will be superb but you will pay an arm and a leg for it. I have seen some SEO companies charging as much as £2000 a month!! I’m not sure how they justify that amount but bigger companies are willing to pay it.

There is a third way to achieve quality results for a more affordable price.

SEO consultancy is sometimes overlooked as these big companies push their products heavily making people believe they can guarantee certain results. SEO consultants tend to be more honest about what to expect and will only charge you for work they will under take for you.

If link building is going to take 5 hours, they will charge you for 5 hours work. SEO consultants also have the ability to work with you personally which is perfect for the ‘smaller’ business owner. They can put a plan together and coach you with regards to SEO aspects. They become more like an online business advisor.

Prices will vary and will fall some where in between the top two examples, but the quality you receive will be second to none and will yield fantastic results.

Of course I cannot speak for other SEO consultants, but as for myself I can offer you a second to none in quality SEO service. If you are a small business looking for affordable search engine optimization please check out my services and contact me if you are interested in taking your online business to new heights.

SEO work can be affordable and highly effective. Quality SEO work will take your business to a new level and increase it’s turnover by up to 200%.

If you want to push your business forward contact me today.