One of the most effective, and free, ways to get targeted traffic to your website has for a long time been to use articles. By writing and submitting them to article directories, and even other blogs and sites, your web-site will benefit in two ways. One is from a back-links, and the other is from direct traffic when people follow the active links within your resource box or article text.
Like many things on the internet, change occurs at a rapid pace, what was effective last year may not be as good now. In this article I want to share some article marketing tips that will work in 2011, and beyond.
Keyword strategy:
In the past a lot of emphasis was placed on keywords and keyword density. Many experts suggested that your main keyword should occur at a density of as much as 4% (or four times in every hundred words). This used to be true, as search engine algorithms where not as sophisticated as they are today. Unfortunately this lead to an awful lot of spammy material being written. This was often unreadable and stuffed with keywords to try and game the system. Obviously something had to change.
In response to this search engines have evolved. Now they take into account LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing. It sounds very impressive and complex, and to be honest if you read an explanation of what this means you will probably come away confused and with a sore head (I did). It talks of mathematical formula, and all sorts of tech speak. Basically however it rewards natural writing, if you write naturally you will use all sorts of words in your article related to your keyword, and LSI takes this into account. The search engine spider looks at the page as a whole, and can intuitively see the relevancy of the text by using this LSI technique.
Whilst your keyword is still important, and should still be in your title first paragraph and conclusion, a density of one to one and a half percent should be more than sufficient, when coupled with on topic writing, to establish your articles relevancy to your niche.
Distribution strategy:
The old article marketing method was to get your content out there in as many places as possible. This is no longer a good idea as duplicate content penalties will devalue its effectiveness greatly. To get maximum return for your efforts this is the path I suggest you follow.
1. Write a page or post for your website – Make it interesting use lots of images and even video to make it stand out.
2. Write an article – Write a unique informative quality article of between 400 to 600 words. Use your allowed number of live links to link back to your page or post from it. Then submit it to a top article directory.
3. Once your article is approved and live, build some links to it, and your page, on some social bookmarking sites like Digg or del.icio.us, plus you should tweet them on twitter and post them to your Facebook page. As well as that you can post a few comments on related blogs by searching for “blog + your keyword.”
4. Multiply your efforts – Rewrite your article four times, and post unique versions to another four top directories. Again once these are approved and live, follow up with the linking strategy in point 3.
Whilst this may seem like a lot of work, you will benefit because you will get maximum return for your efforts. Quality unique content will always be king, and you will effectively future-proof your submissions by doing this.