What is Article Marketing?

16 Jan What is Article Marketing?

What is Article Marketing?

Now that Google has become the first place we go when we need to find something, article marketing has become a vital method for intercepting searches and presenting your product as the answer.

To do this, you have to provide Google with what it needs to list your page high in its results for your target keyword.

Article marketing begins with keyword research. You first of all need to identify your opportunity keywords so you can know what to put in the titles of your articles. As long as your website is optimised (Web Inclusion sites are *always* optimised), then the keyword will automatically appear in the URL for the page as well. (optimised sites use the page title to set the URL).

Articles for marketing need to be no less than 400 words long. That seems to be the minimum Google requires to take a page seriously. It is sometimes possible to rank with less than 400 words but it depends on the keyword, and how much competition there is for it.

Keyword density is a percentage figure signifying the number of times a keyword appears in an article relative to the size of the article. Ideally you want your target keyword to have no less than 1% (once every 100 words) and no more than 2% (once every 50 words). If it appears too often in the article Google may consider it to be contrived and can penalise, or just not index, the page.

You also need to include keywords which Google recognises as ‘associated keywords’ in the article. You can get a handful (six or seven) of these by using Google’s own Keyword Tool which returns results sorted by relevance. These need only have a very low keyword density (less than 1%) but it is important to include them because they add credence and more weight to the relevance of your article to its title keyword.

Finally, and wherever possible, include an image in your article. When you include an image make sure it is tagged correctly and use your target keyword in the title and alt-text tags.

If you do all of the things outlined here, and if you use an opportunity keyword as your target keyword, then you should find your article makes it to the front page of google quite quickly.

How long it stays there depends on other factors which Google uses in its algorithm, such as the volume of backlinks the page has, or social mentions (twitter, facebook, linked in etc.) So once your article is published it is a good idea to reinforce it by giving it mentions and links from your social networks, and also from forums, article directories and anywhere else you can.

Article Directories

There are hundreds of article marketing directories. Some of them are specific to particular niches, others cover everything. It is necessary to pick your article directories carefully so the work you do isn’t wasted. Go for the ones with a high google page rank (more than 5) because backlinks from them are more valuable.

When you post a version of your article to an article directory, make sure it is a different version than that you have posted on your site. It could be shorter, or you could mix up the paragraphs, but Google won’t index it if it finds it to be anything more than 30% duplicated from another page in its database.

Follow this advice with your next article marketing campaign and watch your traffic grow.