Feb
18
2011
Articles have always been a big part of the world of search engine optimization. This means that whatever you do, you should never ignore them and if you decide to employ article marketing as your link building strategy, you should know a couple of things before you start. In case you don’t want to pay professionals to write the articles for you, you should write them yourself. This can be difficult especially when you have never done it before.
1. Brand awareness – When writing articles, make sure you talk about your business. You might not want to overdo it but it is important that you mention it at least a couple of times. When doing that, you will want to avoid the spammy look so you should try to make the article as helpful and useful as possible. If the readers find your article helpful and they want to learn more, they will click on your links and therefore will be taken to your website. This is why it is important to make your article interesting.
2. Avoid spinners – There are a lot of article spinners of the market nowadays. Some are better than others but overall none of them can spin your articles perfectly. Basically what the article spinners do is they change the word and sentence order in your articles and use similar words in an attempt to make the new article unique without you writing a new one all over again. However, the result is far from perfect and although you might achieve some results using that method, it is recommended that you write all of the article yourself. That will give you better results faster.
3. Quality – Another extremely important reason why quality has to be top notch is that articles often get republished. For example, a blog owner sees your article, thinks it will be useful for the readers of his posts and decides to republish it with all of your links. Let’s say this happens 20 times. That means you will get much bigger exposure and a lot more traffic. Make sure people find your article interesting and they will most likely republish it.
4. Engage readers – A great thing you should never forget to do is talk to readers. Most of the times, readers will leave comments on your posts. Whether they just want to thank you for the information or ask a question, you should check regularly and answer as many comments as you can (or all of them if that’s possible). This is a great way to make a good impression and help readers that have questions for example.
Article marketing is much more than just writing. It is recommended that you publish your articles in related directories or different blogs as a guest. Whatever you do, you should never forget to interact with readers and keep their attention. Refer them to your website if they need more information about a certain topic.
Despite the obvious, article marketing can allow you to increase the traffic to your website with this search engine optimization (interesting to know is that in Danish the term is Mere trafik med søgemaskine optimering) technique. However, remember that the content you create for that purpose must be unique and really attractive. It is a good idea to search Google for the hottest topics for the past month and use those that are relevant for your website.