How To Improve Your Search Engine Ranking With Article Marketing
When I talk with website owners who are starting to market their websites with article submissions and ask them what they hope to achieve, most of the time they will reference one or more of these benefits:
A higher search engine rank for their most important keywords, a reputation as an authoritative source of information in their field or more traffic due to people clicking the links to their site in the articles.
Personally, I think that the SEO benefits of article marketing are by far the most important of the three; ranking higher in search engine results for your keywords.
SEO techniques are all designed to do the same thing: get more traffic to your site, especially from the people in your target market or audience. Article marketing is one of the more effective ways of getting your content to the people you want to reach.
Whenever you need information on a topic, you will go to Google or Yahoo or one of the other search engines and type your question or need into the search box. Your target customers are also Googling solutions to their needs.
As a website owner, your goal is to be one of the top results when your customers type their search terms into Google. By being listed at or towards the top of the results pages, you increase your chances of the potential customer clicking through to your website. That is what called “targeted traffic”.
Targeted traffic is exactly what you want – these are the people who are the most likely to be interested in what your site has to offer. The following SEO techniques are ones which can help your site to get a higher ranking in the search results returned by Google and other engines:
1 – Determine what keywords to use. Keywords are the search terms that your target audience will search for when they are looking for a website or a business such as your own.
When you know what those special words are, then you can work to position your website to satisfy those search terms. It isn’t hard to figure out what your keywords are, but it does require a bit of basic research. There are many great keyword suggestion tools on the web, both paid and free. To start with you can look at the Google Keywords Tool, WordTracker Keyword Suggestion Tool, Keyword Discovery, and Overture.
2- Write articles on the topic of your website. Oftentimes as you’re writing you will naturally use your keywords in your article, title and resource box, but it may be helpful to read back over your article after you’ve finished writing it, and see if there are any places where it would be appropriate to subtly use your keyword terms.
While using keywords is important, it is less so than making your articles readable. Write for human readers, not search engines. Don’t pack your articles with keywords – this makes them difficult to read and can even cause them to be ignored by search engines. 1%-3% keyword density is plenty.
3- Keep submitting articles regularly. A few per month is fine, but you need to do this each and every month. This is where a lot of website owners fail; but keeping at your article marketing efforts is important if you want to see results.
Article marketing can be a great addition to your SEO techniques, but you need to be determined about your efforts. If you can keep it up, the benefits will be cumulative over time and can be significant. You will need to get into the habit of writing these articles and submitting them consistently, but the results will be well worth it .