Yogi Land

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 ranking for your keywords
• More traffic to your website via the articles themselves (in addition to traffic garnered from the higher search engine rank for your keywords)
• Establishing yourself as an expert in your niche
• And going along with the status of expert, when someone does a Google search for your name, they are greeted with a list containing your website and your articles.

Each of these benefits is worthwhile and can help improve your business and your website, but out of all of them, which one can have the most dramatic impact on your website over the long term? In my opinion, the greatest reward of Article Marketing comes in terms of SEO–having a higher search engine ranking for your keyword terms. When trying to drive traffic to your website, you need to do something to attract the attention of your target market. This is what article marketing does–it places your website in a prominent position in an arena where your target market is hanging out. Where does everyone’s target market gather? At Google and the other search engines. 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 means that the people who are visiting your website are most likely to be in need of what you’re offering at your website. This is what you’re going for. What are the steps to rank higher in Google and the other search engines? 1- Figure out what your keywords are. Your keywords are not only words that classify the content of your website, but they are the very words that your target market most often types into Google when they are searching for a site like yours. 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. The idea is optimize the article for your keyword terms, while doing so in a natural sounding way. Always keep your reader in mind, and write articles that will be helpful and easy to understand. Be careful not to go overboard with your keywords–keep your keyword density at 3% or lower. 3- Submit articles consistently for the lifetime of your website. This means submitting a few articles each month, month in and month out. This is perhaps the area where people most go astray–consistency is paramount. It’s a lot like embarking on an exercise program–you may work out hard and eat healthy for a few days or weeks or even a few months, but if you stop your new healthy habits that are propelling you towards your goal, you will not see the results you were looking for. Before long you will start regressing until you’re to the point that you were before you started working out. Article Marketing requires steadiness of purpose, doing the same action over and over again to reap cumulative results that can be quite astounding. The hardest part about writing and submitting articles is just sticking with it–if you can develop consist article submission habits, you can see dramatic results over time.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 11:05 am and is filed under Did You Know.... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.