Article Marketing and SEO

How Do You Search on Google?

Do you do a search and go straight to page 10 or even page 5? No, you're looking at page 1 and maybe to page 2, right? If after that, you haven't found what you need, you'll change your search terms, maybe adding more words. Sound familiar?

So why is it acceptable to have your website on page 3 or 4 or 5? It's not!

I've talked about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) quite a bit on this blog because it's really important. It's also important to convert traffic to sales when people get to your site, but that's another topic.

There are 2 main things to remember with SEO:

1. If SEO strategy was easy, everyone would be doing it. In fact, everyone is doing the easy things, which means you have to do more to rank higher than them.
2. You can do SEO yourself but why would you? Hey, I could fix my car myself but I pay a professional to do that work because it would take me too long to learn how to do it and I'd make a lot of mistakes (why does that line remind me of a line from Tommy Boy?).

SEO is not some mystical thing or magic. There is a science to it and anyone can work at it and get their site to rank well - if they have the time.

So with that said (now that I've talked you out of doing it yourself), here is a strategy that I've seen work really well: article marketing. Even if you're not going to do SEO yourself, it's important to understand the value of it and what goes into making it happen.

Article marketing (or article submission) is where you (or someone you hire) write an article about a topic on an article directory website. At the end of the article, you get what is called a "resource box" where you go to toot your own horn and keyword link to your website. Your article needs to be over 400 words and needs to be good. You can't just ramble on about your cat if you're writing about how to cook chili. So it needs to be good and informative, which means you may have to do some research on the topic if it's not all in your head (and everyone has hobbies, so everyone has a lot in their head about a few topics).

Now why on earth would you spend an hour or so writing an article? The answer is, you're getting a link on another website or you may even get a bunch of links on many sites with just 1 article. There are article submission services out there that get your article onto their website or onto many websites. The cool thing is that they categorize your article with other like articles but you get your own page and your link appears within the main content area of a page that has text having to do with your website. So that very relevant page points to (or "votes" for) your website. That's gold, brother!

It's kind of like macro-blogging or blogging on other people's sites. Pretty cool.

If you're not a writer, you can hire people to write for you (outsource it). If you don't know the best place to submit your articles, there are companies that know that, too (cough... Webstix).

Just another piece of the SEO puzzle - and a good one since inbound links are just huge to ranking high. Huge!

-Tony

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