How Does Article Marketing Work?

As Internet marketing strategies go, article marketing is one of the cheapest and most effective. The secret to article marketing is pretty simple and can be laid out in a few steps…

1. Build the theme of your article around a keyword or keyword phrase that is relevant to one of the products or services on your website.
2. Offer relevant, useful, high quality information, advice or tips about the product, service or whatever it is you are writing about to whet the reader’s appetite for more…
3. Post a link in the “resource box” that appears at the foot of the article inviting the reader can click through to your website.

Five to seven paragraphs of useful content plus an introductory paragraph and a conclusion is all you need. An article can be anywhere between 450-850 words long.

Your article is much more likely to be read if you keep the paragraphs short. Two or three sentences per paragraph is enough. Cut long sentences into two short ones. A neatly structured article with short paragraphs is more inviting to the eye.

Always Add A Resource Box

Most importantly, every time you write an article for an article directory you MUST include an author resource box at the foot of the article. Your resource box is the place where you provide some information about yourself and invite the reader to click a link and visit your website. Your article may have the best information available on your topic, but if you don’t provide a link back to your site, all your effort has been wasted.

Your link needs to contain the full URL and not just a hidden hyper link. For example, you should type “http://www.grasp-the-nettle.com“, and not just, “grasp-the-nettle.com“. By typing out your URL in full you allow the spiders to identify the link to your site.

Every time your article is posted on another website you get one more one-way link back to your website.

How Do One-Way Back Links Help Your Site?

One of the best things you can do to improve your search engine placement is to get as many one-way back links pointing towards your website as possible.

There are two basic types of back link, reciprocal links and one-way links. A reciprocal link means that your website and anther website have exchanged links pointing towards each others site. A one way link means that the other website points at your site, without you having to supply a link back to their website. From the point of view of search engine ranking, one way links are much better.

So, the more one-way links that you have pointing back to your website the more importance Google and the other search engines will place on your site. The most effective way of doing that is to write and publish articles.

Use Long Tail Keyword Phrases To Achieve Better Results

People don’t just use a single keyword to find information on the search engines. They often narrow down their search by typing a multitude of other words to make long phrase strings. These are known as long tail keywords.

Learning to take advantage of long tail keywords is one of the secrets to article marketing success.

Let’s take the game of mahjong as an example. Suppose you have a website dedicated to selling Japanese mahjong sets, your primary keyword would be “mahjong“.

Using one of the keyword analysis tools we discussed in lesson two you will quickly discover that the single keyword mahjong has over 16,500,000 searches which is far too many to you to compete against as a newcomer to the market.

Also, if you type “mahjong” into Google.com you will see that there are over 16 million competing webpages. That is a massive amount, and many people may feel daunted by the competition.

But don’t despair! This is where long tail keywords are very useful.

For example, the keyword phrase “Japanese mahjong” has just under 3 million searches, and a similar number of competing websites.

So we refine some more.

The phrase “Japanese mahjong tiles” receives 79,200 searches on 80,200 sites…

The phrase “genuine Japanese mahjong sets” receives 9,330 searches on 8,760 sites and looks like a promising long tail keyword for an article about Japanese mahjong.

Now you have a good long tail phrase, you simply write an article about “genuine Japanese mahjong sets”.

Make sure you include the keyword phase in the title. In our example the title would be something like “The Unique Character Of Genuine Japanese Mahjong Sets”, or “How To Identify Genuine Japanese Mahjong Sets”.

When you have found a good keyword phrase you will find that your article practically writes itself. Or at least, the article will be much easier to write because it is much more focused around a targeted theme.

Latent Semantic Indexing

The major search engines are now capable of working with Latent Semantic Indexing (see Lesson Four), which means that you can vary your long tail keyword phrase a little so as to write in a more natural style so that people can read and understand more easily.

How to Determine Your Keyword Density Level

Do not obsess over this question. There is not a hard and fast rule. For best results keep your article’s keyword density between 0.5% and 2%, but most of all makes sure your article reads naturally.

Actually, if you repeat your keyword too often it will read unnaturally and the search engines, especially Google, will penalize it. So do not go in for “keyword stuffing” – it is bad for search engine ranking and it will irritate your readers.

Here is what Google’s Matt Cutts says about keyword density:

Using HTML In Your Resource Box

You also want to include the keyword phrase in your author resource box. It is a very good idea to link the keyword phrase back to your website, if HTML is allowed on the article directory where you post your article, like this:

For more information about how to purchase <a href=”http://www.japanese-games-shop.com/mahjong/japanese-mahjong/”>genuine Japanese mahjong sets</a>, check out my website at <a href=”http://japanese-games-shop.com”>Japanese-Games-Shop.com</a>.

Lesson Seven: Article Publishing