Online article marketing can effectively improve organic search results in a number of ways:
Improve visibility for your target keyword phrases
Obtain traffic for additional (long tail) keyword searches
Assist in building awareness and reputation
Increase targeted traffic from other quality related websites
Helps attract more incoming links to your site
Helps make your website more unique and useful
Google’s Panda update showed once again, that it’s important to have high quality, unique content. We recently evaluated a large ecommerce website that was stung by the Panda update. They have a few issues that have probably hurt them, but one of the areas of concern included many articles they had written and placed on various websites, many of which had been devalued in Panda.
In this article, I’ll cover the steps we take with article marketing. These steps have been developed from years of examining what competitors of our clients have done to become the ranking and traffic leaders in their industries. Effective article marketing is a key strategy for many of them.
Effective Article Marketing Is NOT About Submitting To Article Submissions Sites!
Let’s dispel a misconception right now. Submitting articles to article submission sites, especially low quality articles written primarily for search results, does little for you.
We examined the results of the work done for one of our clients, for example, by their prior SEO who was writing low quality articles and submitting them to article submission sites like ehow.com with links to their site. These articles where doing almost nothing for them (and this was prior to Panda). Checking their analytics, we saw that no traffic ever came from these article submission sites, ever! It’s very unlikely that these articles helped their search engine rankings at all.
Most article submission sites do not pass much, if any “link juice” (or PageRank or whatever you want to call it) to the sites the articles link to. We found none of these articles in any of the tools we use to identify strong links, those that may be helping improve search positions. Finally, none of the articles were ever picked up and run by any other site (no surprise as they’re not very good or useful articles).
Having your Web marketing company produce low quality articles is of little value to anybody (other than the marketing company that gets paid to write the articles).
The Goals Of Online Article Marketing
Effective article marketing is about writing quality articles that are useful or interesting to your market, using some on your own website and getting some published on other related websites.
Here are our goals for online article marketing for our clients:
- Improving Organic Search Results (Getting found for more keyword searches and helping to increase rankings).
- Help Attract Incoming Links To The Site.
- Building Awareness And Often Reputation Building.
- Increasing Targeted Traffic From Related Sites.
- To Help Make A Web Site More Unique And Useful (e.g. Help educate your readers, help them decide what products/services to buy, etc.).
