Article Marketing

Successful Article Marketing

What Is An Article?

An article is a piece of topical information written for the purpose of SEO.   Article marketing used to be very popular in the early days on the internet and SEO.

People write articles on topics that are of interest to them or are related to their business/market. 

What Is Article Marketing

Article marketing is all about broadening your visibility for certain search phrases and topics on the internet. 

Articles are created by the webmaster (owner of the website) and then uploaded onto article marketing websites.

The idea being that the articles are written providing relevant and topical information about a certain topic and then point back to the target website.

So for example, an owner of a website about garden tools could set up their website and post articles about garden tools on their website. 

They would then write a series of articles about specific sub topics (spades, lawn maintenance, weatherproof shears) and submit them to article websites. 

These articles would use keywords in them pointing back to the owners website (and the articles on the site).

Article Marketing Tips

Creating an article is quite simple, but it does need to be done with SEO in mind.  The reason you write an article after all is so that people can read it and will come back to you with enquiries or business.  

Here are a few tips to bare in mind:

• Your Headline Or Title – The headlines you use are extremely important when it comes to attracting viewers and improving your search engine optimisation, so you should exercise care when choosing them. There are several factors that go into creating strong well optimised headlines.
• The Heading – Your Heading should be as short and concise as possible and accurately reflect the information that can be found in your article. Don’t make the mistake of choosing a snappy headline to get people’s attention if your content of the article doesn’t match the heading.
• Think SEO – To incorporate search engine optimisation into your article marketing strategy.  Research your keywords to select headlines that web users are likely to search for (high search volume) and have low competition for.
• Keyword Placement – Having your keywords spread throughout your article is important.  Not too many but the right ratio.  Using SEO tools such as YOAST with WordPress can help.  Keyword placement at the very start middle and end is essential as well as keywords spread throughout.  However, write your articles as it people are reading them and not search engines, but keep in mind it has to be written with the search engines in mind.
• Keyword Variation – Using different variations of your keywords within your article is wise.  Remember that SEO and search engine algorithms are always evolving, so what may work today may not work tomorrow.  As above, write with the person in mind but your articles are for the search engines.

What Is An Article Directory

An article directory is a website that is set up exclusively for the purpose of hosting other peoples marketing articles on. 

Website owners would create unique content on their own websites.  Then produce related articles to submit to the article directory and point back to their own websites for SEO purposes.

It is all about getting visitors to your website.

There are hundreds of article directories on the internet, some of the best known ones would be:

• Squidoo
• Ezine Articles
• Go Articles
• Buzzle
• Hub Pages
• Knoll

These sites are free and other than the time needed to create the individual articles, there is no cost in producing articles for SEO purposes.

How To Do Article Marketing

Stand alone articles are OK, but the best strategy for article marketing is by daisy chaining them.

Stand Alone Articles

Going back to the garden tool website; a stand along article would be 1 article written relating to a subject or article on the site, and posted to one of the article directories above.

Daisy Chain Articles

This would involve writing a series of articles around the topic/page on your website and then adding each one to a different article website. 

The thing about daisy chaining the articles is by making them point to each other and back at your own website.  This adds more authority (in that the links will also be going to other articles you have on the other article websites, which would have a high PR rank).

Daisy chaining articles brings more authority to your articles and as such bring more authority to your website.

Writing Articles

Writing articles is great for SEO as it causes quality backlinks to a website; the only thing is it takes time.

There are article writing websites (that will take an article and adapt it so that it tricks search engines into thinking that the modified articles are unique).  

However this is not advised. Natural article writing is by far the best way to keep quality high and show search engines slow and steady progress up the ranks.

Compare quotes from local SEO companies on article marketing.  Choosing a marketing company for your article writing needs to be done with care.  Article marketing is all about quality.

Further SEO Articles