What SEO Article Marketing Is(n’t)
[NOTE: Google's Panda program has rendered some of the strategies in this guide useless. It is now available for demonstrative writing purposes only.]
In a nutshell, SEO Article Marketing is a promotional strategy designed to attract website visitors via articles (content). SEO stands for “search engine optimization,” and this simple acronym already tells us (1) what kind of articles we’re working with (optimized), and (2) where they’re used in the world of marketing (search engines).
But SEO Article Marketing is really just a new twist on an old principle.
When website building was new, we were told to stuff our websites with interesting articles in order to ‘retain’ visitor interest and increase sales probability. The idea behind that strategy was that the longer a visitor stays on a website, the better the chance of obtaining a sale.
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A Good Read: Content is Cash: Leveraging Great Content and the Web for Increased Traffic, Sales, Leads and Buzz (Que Biz-Tech)
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Today, we’re told to do the same. However this time around, the reason is to not only retain visitor interest, it’s also to ‘attract’ visitors. The idea behind this particular strategy is that sales probability is somewhat proportionate to the number of website visits. And the more visitors you can get to click onto your site, the better your chances are of ringing that cash register!
SEO Article Marketing uses optimized content – that is, content that is hyperfocused on a single concept – to increase website traffic, and it’s success is based on the grounds that:
1. Search engines list websites containing hyper-focused content (interpreted as “relevant” content) higher than other websites.
2. A visitor is more likely to click a link to a website that appears on the first page of search engine results rather than a website that appears on the second, third… or even tenth page of results.
By placing optimized content on your website, not only will search engines list your website higher than other sites, Internet users will click the link to your URL simply because it showed up before a bunch of others!
SEO Article Marketing works to place your website in the forefront for visitors to interact with and possibly transact with. And if you’re serious about increasing website traffic, you simply can’t ignore the significance that SEO Article Marketing plays in online business.
What SEO Article Marketing is Not
Some of us have already seen the article marketing strategy in use via Adsense content sites. Adsense content sites (usually) contain hoards of articles and advertisements served by Google Ads.
The problem with these types of websites is that they’ve literally flooded and abused the search engines with repetitive and insignificant content – that is, content that is nothing more than a rehash of what’s already considered public knowledge. In fact, there’s really nothing to differentiate these kinds of websites from one another except their URLs.
Known as search engine spamming or spamdexing, publishing repetitive content is the wrong way to use SEO Article Marketing and due to user complaints, search engines like Google have set forth policy to remove these kinds of websites from their indexes. You can see Google’s policy for handling content like this through its online Spam Report form: http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html. In particular, this form addresses “Duplicate site or pages” as inappropriate material.
Don’t let this abuse deter you from applying this marketing method to your own efforts, however. One very important lesson can be gleaned from SEO Article Marketing – and that is that the strategy works – even if we’re not pleased with how others are applying it. Proper SEO Article Marketing requires new and useful content that supports the interests behind the product or service that’s being sold.
And it also requires a little strategic thinking. Having written SEO articles for over 40+ clients, we’ve learned what that strategic thinking is and when followed, the results are well rewarded.
What SEO Article Marketing Needs To Work Properly
Assuming that you’ve vowed to create new and useful content, the first thing you need to do is create a list of keywords that people will use to find you. This first step may seem painfully obvious, but we’ve seen a few marketers make some mistakes at this point by failing to think like a customer and failing to choose effective keywords.
Instead of choosing keywords that a customer would think of for example, some people mistakenly choose keywords that a marketer would choose – or worse, they pull out a thesaurus and create a 50- word list of synonymous metatag content. You have to remember that customers don’t necessarily think like a marketer. So while you might think that “financial planner” or “financial software” are appropriate keywords for your articles, you’re missing a huge sales opportunity when you ignore keywords and key phrases like “reduce credit debt” or “fix my budget.”
Another sales opportunity lies in geographically based keywords like “retirement + plan + Sacramento” or “credit + Reno” for example. 40% of search engine queries include geographically based keywords.
The keywords you choose must match the ones that your target market will use on sites like Yahoo, MSN, or Google. Thankfully it isn’t that hard to find out what these keywords are and there are a good number of software programs to help you discover what they are. One that comes to mind is Softnik Technologies‘ “Good Keywords” freeware program, but there are other similar programs like Google Trends and Overture.
By entering a very basic search term into one of these programs, you’ll not only get an extensive list of matching keywords that people use on a daily basis, you’ll get them in the order that they’re used. And this order will help you determine just where to use them in your articles.
