By: Seomul Evans
Submitted: 2009-10-10 07:12:12 | Word Count: 639
The ultimate goal of SEO is to get targeted traffic to your website. Targeted traffic consists of potential customers who have already researched products or services within your niche, and who are fairly close to making a purchase. These people are clear about what they want and are usually just making some last minute comparisons before finally settling on a vendor. There are many strategies for attracting targeted traffic to your website, and article marketing is one of the most effective. Here are three reasons to use article marketing in your SEO efforts.
1. It’s Free. Article marketing is free advertising for your business. Many article directories don’t charge to list your articles, and the link that you include when you submit your article leads readers right back to your website. So you have people interested in what you have to offer reading your articles in order to gain more information, and they have easy access to your website via the link that you provide. What a great way to advertise! The key to article marketing for SEO, however, is to make sure that your article isn’t an obvious advertisement for your business. Readers expect your article to provide information, not a hard sales pitch, and most readers will ignore articles that make the hard sell. You merely want to pique the reader’s curiosity so that he will follow your link in order to find out more about what you have to offer.
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2. It Increases Your Search Engine Rank. And an increased search engine rank means more targeted traffic to your website which, as we said before, is the ultimate end of SEO. Instead of merely submitted your articles to directories, you should also create a page of the articles you’ve written and include it on your website. The search engines will see pages and pages of content relevant to your product or service and will ultimately reward you by giving you a higher search engine ranking.
3. It Increases Links to Your Website. One of the ways that search engines determine a website’s ranking is by the number of links to the site. This should be obvious if you’ve spent any time researching or doing SEO. And search engines assign even greater value to websites that have links from other authoritative websites. Therein lies the beauty of article marketing. If your articles are listed in directories that the search engines deem to be authoritative within your market niche, then you benefit. When you submit your article to a directory, you have the opportunity to put a link back to your website in what is called the resource box.
The two primary keys to successful SEO are good content and relevant links. Article marketing is a great way to achieve both. When you create good content in the form of articles and then post those articles on your website, you have signaled to the search engines that your content is relevant to your market niche. In addition, you also establish yourself as an authority in your field, which helps your target audience built trust in you—and whatever it is that you’re offering to them. Search engines also reward relevant links. By submitting your articles to directories and getting links back to your site from those directories, you’re telling the search engines that well respected websites find your information helpful and relevant. So there’s no way to overestimate the importance of article marketing to your SEO endeavors. If you’re not already committed to article marketing as an SEO tool, you would serve your business well by beginning to submit articles to directories right away. It does take some time and effort, but it’s free, and you’ll be glad you put in the work when you see the results!
