Link Building Strategies - Part 2 - Article Marketing

Article marketing is one of the top link building methods that helps your website in ranking high on search engines. Whether you have a niche site, affiliate site or authority site, you need traffic to promote the site and turn page visits of prospective customers into conversions because the ultimate goal of your business is to make money. Article marketing is a very dependable method to help bring in lots of traffic to your website.

Let us suppose that you have your own niche website launched recently. You need to decide on the number of pages that your site would have and the appearance of the website. Once you have uploaded the content on your website it is ready to be publicized. Article marketing involves submission of quality articles to the various article directories that brings in inbound links to your website. The higher the number of links, the more the visibility of your website on the search engines, so when people search for a specific term or phrase relating to your niche, there are chances of your site coming up in the first few positions on page one.

This series of hubs I have started to write is aimed at beginners and those who are not very familiar with the process of link building. I am still learning (there is so much to learn everyday as new things keep coming up) the tricks of the trade. By tricks I mean the knack that you need to possess to handle things skilfully so as to popularize your website.

Coming back to article submission, where do you start? First let's talk about the articles. The articles you write and submit to the directories should be related to the content on your website because relevancy is very important both for the readers and the search engine spiders. Both love good and fresh content. After writing your article, head over to ezinearticles.com (any article directory of PR 5 and above) and sign up. It is free to register. Read the article submission guidelines before submitting your article.

Anchor text and author bio

There are two important things you should focus on while submitting an article. In the article body, place a link to your home page using anchor text. The presence of anchor text involves the use of your principal keyword in a particular phrase that is clickable and takes you to the home page of your site. The anchor text link that takes visitors to the parent website is very powerful and is responsible for increase in search engine rankings of your website as well as for conversions (of clicks into sales).

Another important part of article submission on any article directory is the author bio. At the end of the article you come across a resource box. Here you need to write a few things about yourself and give a strong call to action thus attracting traffic to your niche website. It is said that the success of the click through rate to the main website depends largely on the contents of this resource box in addition to the main content.

There are several article submission sites namely articlealley.com, articledashboard.com, isnare.com, helium.com, and articlecity.com to name a few. These have a high page rank (PR). There are several web 2.0 properties where you can get your articles published and gain powerful backlinks. Always choose ones with high PR so that when you get an inbound link from them, it will be of good quality and search engines recognize such links to be relevant and valuable.

The articles submitted to these directories need to be of high quality too. Take care to see that:

• the headline is attention-grabbing so that your visitors want to find out more about the topic
• the keyword is included in the title
• there are enough sub-headings with the keyword
• the article is not over-stuffed with keywords; the article should flow naturally and should convey great information.
• apart from the title, the keyword is included once in the first paragraph, a few times along the length of the article and once in the last paragraph. A 500-word article should optimally have the keyword about 8 to 10 times, no more.
• you always think from the readers' perspective. The articles you write should answer their questions or solve their issues.

When all the above are taken into consideration while writing an article and submitting it to an article directory, it is sure to encourage a good click through to your main site and increase traffic that in turn will increase your sales.

This way, when you submit good articles to several top directories, you get quality backlinks to your website. These links help improve your ranking on Google and other search engines. When people find your article on the pages listed on Google, the article should be good enough to make the reader click through to your home page or sales page that is precisely your prime requirement.

As the number of links increase with time and your effort, your home page also gets listed on top of the search engines which means more traffic and more sales depending on the quality of the product or services that you offer.

The success of article marketing depends on the number of articles you write and submit to the directories. Write as many articles as or more than the number of pages on your website related to your niche. You could even tweak the main articles and make them look new and submit them. You are allowed to place two links on almost all the article directories, so with every article submission you get two links to your home page.

Always remember that article marketing is only one part of the link building strategy and should not be overdone. Back linking should be a natural process with diversified methods that would make the whole procedure natural in the watchful eyes of Google. We will look at the other methods of building backlinks in the hubs that follow.

I hope I have covered all the points necessary to explain article marketing in detail. I have shared all the information that I use personally in my link building work for my clients. I have been quite successful in ranking high for specific keywords, so I decided to share with my fellow hubbers who may not be familiar with the subject.