Article Marketing: 3 Days to Success

Every SEO site you visit will tell you that article marketing is a powerful tool for inbound link building.

Writing an article takes a lot of time and effort, and you want to get the most out of your hard work. But if you don’t understand how to use article marketing the right way, your site will not reap all the benefits it should.

During the next three days, I’m going to show you how to write and market your articles so you will get inbound keyword links that are search engine (especially Google) friendly and will help increase the rankings of your website.

Article Marketing = Increasing the Knowledge Base

Are you old enough to remember Encyclopedia Britannica? When I was was growing up pre-World Wide Web, I loved to read articles from our family set, and actually read through every one of the 26 volumes. The Internet is like a massive encyclopedia that contains the combined knowledge of millions of people from all over the world.

To create inbound links to your site that will be considered Google-friendly and that will help increase your site’s search engine rankings, you need to take the time and make the effort to add to this knowledge base.

What makes the Internet so cool is that you get the viewpoints of many different people about any given topic. So yes, whatever you write about has most likely been said before, but you have a unique perspective and way of of explaining or describing your area of expertise that is like no other individual’s. This is what makes your article unique and interesting.

Your Article Doesn’t Have To Be Perfect

Some people have a gift for writing, but you don’t have to be a great writer to share content that will be meaningful to others. After all, you’re the expert!

Unsure of yourself? Just do it – sit down and write out what you want to say. A few tips:

1. Don’t write a sales pitch – who wants to read that? By the same token, don’t use industry jargon – a conversational tone usually works best. I sometimes have to go back and remove  “agency-speak” from my blog articles.


2. Don’t worry about cramming keywords in your article; make it natural. Write it like you’re talking to another person. If you and I were having a conversation, I wouldn’t say “I’d like to help you with your article marketing because article marketing will make your site rank better and I have a lot of experience with article marketing.”


3. Take a different approach and have some fun with it. Instead of rehashing what everyone else has said, go with a unique viewpoint. Throw in your own thoughts, add a quote, give an example, or tell a story.


4. Make sure your article provides value by answering a question or solving a problem for the reader. If you need ideas, ask your friends and family what they’d like to know about your business and then write about that.


5. Make it current – stay on top of what’s happening in your industry and take advantage of it. One of our articles hit #3 on Google and brought hundreds of visitors within a few days because it answered a question about a new law that had just been passed in Arizona.

After you’ve finished hammering out a rough draft you can polish it up – do a little rewriting where it’s needed, move sentences and paragraphs around to make the article more cohesive, but don’t freak out about it. Sometimes “good enough” is fine. Whatever you do though, don’t forget to check grammar and run spell check!

Next:

Article Marketing Part 2: Keywords, Links, and Your Resource Box

Article Marketing Part 3: Best Places to Syndicate Your Articles

© Kay Frenzer-Zeeh - visit SEO Diva for more great content.

Tags: article marketing, inbound links, link building, marketing, search engine ranking, search engine rankings, SEO

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Article Marketing Part 2: Keywords, Links, and Your Resource Box

When you write an article, it’s tempting to add your keywords in as often as possible. However,  it’s important to NOT cram keywords into it, or your article will look like spam content and may also be rejected by the article syndication service.

The algorithms used in today’s search engines are quite sophisticated and can easily figure out what your article is about without you hammering it home. You’ll also alienate your readers if your article reads like it’s meant for search engines instead of human beings.

The two places where you must have your target keyword phrase are in your title and your link. It’s very important to do this the right way:

1. If at all possible, put your keyword at the beginning of your article’s title. For example, “Article Marketing – 3 Days to Success” instead of “3 Days to Successful Article Marketing.”


2. Make your link, whether in your resource box for article syndication sites or in the article itself, your exact keyword phrase: “Read SEO Diva to learn about article marketing and how to…“


3. Don’t neglect to use your keyword phrase in the tags for the article.

It should be obvious, but I’ll say it anyway: make the article relevant to your keywords. I’ve come across articles that are about one thing, such as housebreaking a dog, and then in the resource box the linked keyword phrase is for something like Acai diet products. There’s no relevancy there, and it’s doubtful the link would add anything to the website’s ranking.

Using the Resource Box to Your Advantage

When you submit your article to a syndication site, you are often not allowed to put self-serving links within the article itself. Instead, you’re allowed two links in the resource box at the end of the article.

To make the most of it, write two or more sentences in a custom resource box for each article you submit. Ezine Articles recommends it be around 15% of your article’s word count.

One sentence should be a call to action along with your keyword linked to the most relevant page on your site (not your home page in most cases). For example, when you click on the article marketing link shown in #2 above, you’ll see that the link does not go to my home page but to an interior page of this site.

The second link should be an actual URL; using my example, it would be http://www.seodiva.net/article-marketing-3-days/. The reason is that when others republish your article, sometimes your link will be stripped out. However, by including your URL you have a better chance of 1) getting credit for the article and 2) for the reader to go to your site for more information.

You should also include the name of your business or site in the resource box, again for credit for the article as well as information for the reader.

Don’t forget to complete your author bio. Write a little about yourself, add your business name, a link to your site, and your social networking links.

When Others Publish Your Article

When other websites publish your article, they are supposed to keep the resource box and all links intact. Some do, but others strip out the links. By including your actual URL and business/site name, you are ensuring that the reader knows where the article came from.

Some unscrupulous people will exclude the resource box entirely, but since they are using duplicate content they aren’t getting credit for it from the search engines. Yes, it’s a ripoff, but your time is usually better spent writing more articles than tracking these people down and demanding they remove it.

Next: Article Marketing Part 3: Best Places to Syndicate Your Articles

Part 1: Article Marketing – 3 Days to Success

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Tags: article marketing, article syndication, keywords, link building, links, SEO tips

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Article Marketing Part 3: The Best Places to Syndicate Your Articles

Now it’s time to syndicate your article on the Internet.

You will learn which article marketing directory works best for you, but here’s a rundown of some of my favorites. Except for Zimbio, they give direct links.

Your Blog – The first place you should put your article is on your blog itself. Wait a few days before you submit it to any other site, to give the search engines time to index it.

Ezine Articles – Articles published on Ezine are well respected and may actually rank in and of themselves. This article marketing service has strict guidelines and I strongly suggest you read them prior to submitting an article for approval. If you have first published the article on your blog, use the Ezine plugin (available from their site) to submit it; this avoids rejection because of duplicated content.

Go Articles – If you’re having problems getting articles approved on Ezine, you may want to use Go Articles instead. Their guidelines are not as strict and it’s easier to get articles published. Sometimes articles from this site will rank in search results.

Zimbio – If you’ve got a blog, set up an account on Zimbio and then register your blog so it will feed to Zimbio. I like to make my own “Wikizine” on the site and specify that my blog articles publish to it. Although the links are filtered through the site’s URL, articles can send traffic and rank on Google search results.

Squidoo – I have a soft spot for Squidoo. At one time articles from here would rank right at the top. There was a smackdown when spammers started misusing the site, and now the articles don’t rank as easily, but they still provide links and often some good traffic to your site. Squidoo lenses, as they are called, are fun to create too. For best results be sure to make at least five modules and add pictures.

Update: This Squidoo lens showed up on the first page of Google a couple of days after it was published. This gives the business 3 listings on the first page – always a plus!

Check out this list of the Top 50 Article Directories – gives traffic, pagerank, and whether the directory employs the nofollow tag.

I’d love to know which article syndication sites you prefer to use and that give you the best results.

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Ezine–Still Good for Article Marketing?

With the Google Farmer algorithm update one type of site that got hit hard was article directories, including Ezine Articles…reminiscent of the  Squidoo slap-down a couple of years ago.

Many people had great articles on Ezine that ranked well and sent visitors to their site. However, a lot of Ezine articles were crap, and many of those were also ranking on the first page of Google. Everybody dropped, good and bad alike.

So now the question is, should you continue to submit to Ezine for article marketing purposes? My answer is yes for a couple of reasons. One is that Ezine Articles was the best article marketing site before the update, and now they have made 5 changes to upgrade the quality of future article submissions:

1. Increased Quality Checks – Articles are spending twice as much time in the review process, and their editors are placing more focus on format, grammar, spelling, and consistency.


2. WordPress Plugin and API – No longer being accepted to avoid content duplication.


3. Dead Links – In the past, if you had a dead link Ezine gave you 5 weeks to fix it, with numerous notifications. Now you have 2 weeks to get it taken care of.


4. Membership Level – I think they’re being a little too strict on this, but now if you haven’t met their quality requirements within the first 10 articles you submit, you not only don’t reach Platinum level but are banned from submitting more articles. They have backpedaled a little though, saying that if you are showing progress they’ll be a bit more lenient.


5. 400 Word Minimum – Before it was 250 words, and a good writer can often get their message across in that short of an article. That said, this makes writers work harder to write worthwhile content.

Life just got a little harder for article marketers, but I think it’s worth it to get high quality information on the Internet and in search results. What’s your opinion of these Ezine Article changes?

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