Article Writing | Best Internet Marketing Strategies

#6 – Article Writing

Writing and publishing articles should always be a key part of your Internet marketing strategy.

Here’s why…

Writing articles and distributing them to article directories on the Internet is one of the cheapest and easiest ways to generate targeted traffic to your website.

Anybody with average English skills and writing ability can write articles and publish them on the various article directories on the internet. You do not have to by a literary genius to get your articles onto the article directories.

If your article is clear and to-the-point, it is likely that it will be picked up by various webmasters and bloggers and republished as information on their sites. This often happens just hours after the article has appeared on the Internet.

To make article publishing work as an Internet marketing strategy, there are a few things you need to know about.

Always Add A Resource Box

Most importantly, every time you write an article 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.

How Does Article Marketing Work?

As Internet marketing strategies go, article marketing is one of the most effective – if you know what you are doing. Nor is it difficult. In fact the secret to article marketing is pretty simple and can be laid out in a few steps…

Build your theme of your article around a keyword or keyword phrase that is relevant to one of the products or services on your website.
Offer useful information, advice or tips about the product, service or whatever it is you are writing about to whet the reader’s appetite for more…
Use the author box to invite the reader to click through to your website to find out more.

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.

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 the long tail keywords are very useful. Remember, long tail keywords are strings of keywords, or keyword phrases, that are searched for fewer times per month, and more importantly, have less competition.

For example, “Japanese mahjong” has just under 3 million searches, and a similar number of competing websites. That is still a lot of sites to wave a stick at though…

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…

Now you have a good long tail phrase, you simply write an article about “genuine Japanese mahjong sets”. Then you publish this article to the various search directories. The beauty of it is that a longtail keyword phrase tells you exactly what you must write your article about, so you no longer have to scratch your head to think of a good topic for an article.

Simple!!!

Your article needs to include a title, the body, and your author resource box (the most important part). 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” etc.

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

Some people think that keyword density should range from 0.5% up to 6% of the total article body. Personally, I think 0.5% is too low, and 6% will probably get your article classified as spam. For best results keep your article’s keyword density between 1% and 2%. Search engines can figure out what the article is about, and the article will not be written in a forced “keyword packing” style that irritates a lot of readers.

Basically, you need to include the keyword phrase in your title, and you should include the keyword in each paragraph, but especially the first one or two. This will normally get you between 1% and 2% keyword density level, which is where you want to be.

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://japanese-mahjong.com/mjgoods.html”}genuine Japanese mahjong sets{/a}, check out my website at {a href=”http://japanese-mahjong.com”}Japanese-Mahjong.com{/a}.

(Replace the curly brackets, {…} with pointed brackets < >.)
David, This Is Great, BUT…I just don’t have time or confidence to write articles…

If you do not have time or confidence to write your own articles, that is fine. There are two options available to you if you want to take advantage of article marketing: