In just a few words, let’s discuss some SEO article marketing tips because a lot of online business owners need it. Whenever the word SEO is mentioned, it’s almost certain that the phrase “article marketing” will pop out in the conversation. Many internet entrepreneurs are aware of the fact that article marketing is one of the best ways to apply search engine optimization techniques. Submission to popular directories with high traffic volumes also provides greater exposure for your brand, product or service.

There are two ways by which article marketing can help you gain more website visitors. First, submitting articles to popular directories can help you get “direct traffic”. By direct traffic, we mean that people are finding your articles posted online and then they visit your website after they read your article resource box. This requires some SEO because you need to optimize your online content so that people can find it online when they use the search engines.

To gain direct traffic, it is important that you write your articles to attract both the search engines and people. Lots of marketers optimize their content for the search engines but the articles they post are barely readable. Instead of doing that, I suggest you study a little bit of copywriting so that you will know how to arouse attention, provoke interest, intensify buying desire, and prompt your readers to action. There’s more to writing articles than piecing together some long tail keywords and talking in circles. You have to actually help your readers get valuable information that they want and need.

Your article headline is extremely important because both the search engines and people will take a look at it to decide whether it’s worth the time and exposure. The search engines will check if your title is keyword-rich. If it is, and there’s lesser competition for that phrase, your article has a higher chance of ranking higher in search results. In fact, lots of web pages which rank number one in Google and Yahoo are not formal landing page sites, but article pages in popular directories. The key to doing this is to put your keywords on the first two or three words of the article title.

The second way through which article marketing helps you get website visitors is “organic traffic”. Organic traffic means that people visited your site because it appeared in the search engine results and they ended up clicking on it. This is much more difficult to generate than direct article traffic, because organic traffic actually means your website homepage should rank for more popular keyword phrases with heavy competition.

The main strategies for gaining organic traffic include effective keyword placement on your landing page, and building backlinks. “Backlinks” refer to webpages that link to your site. In this area, article marketing can help because if your articles get picked up by other blogs and publishing platforms, your website links will also be published along with the articles. The more websites or blogs that link to your own homepage, the higher your backlink count. The higher your backlink count, the greater chances you will have of higher search engine rankings.

When most internet users are seeking information, they will go to a search engine, type in a few keywords and then choose from the many results that show up. Gone are the days when websites can pack keywords into their Meta tags, fooling search engines into thinking they are something they aren’t while frustrating customers. Today’s search engine results are based on the quality of information provided by a website, based on the search terms entered by the user.
Article marketing has grown into one of the key methods companies use to provide the relevant information search engines love. Internet users also appreciate the fact that when they type in a search term, the information returned actually pertains to the terms they entered. Businesses are finding that happy internet users tend to spend more money and by using article marketing they get a bigger return on their investment.

In order for article marketing to be effective, the articles you submit to informational sites need to be related to your business. With many article repositories, information about the company can be included at the end of the article, known as the biography section. In this section, a link to the company’s home page can be included and when visitors like what they read, they can click on the link and head straight to the site.

Many businesses also provide information directly on their website, using article marketing to attract visitors directly to their site. The key here is to have quality articles that directly relate to the content of the page as well as containing a sufficient number of keywords to attract search engines. Typical articles will be between 300 and 500 words, with a keyword density of between two and three percent. Translation: a 400 word article will contain the keyword between eight and 12 times. Anything less may not be considered worthwhile content and anything more may be seen as spam.

Articles published on you site also have to be completely original, meaning you can’t simply copy articles from somewhere else on the internet, which also be a violation of copyright laws, and needs to be relevant to the information or products on your site. For example, if you have a website related to travel you could offer articles with information about luggage, rental cars, travel companies and just about anything else pertaining to what people might need to go on vacation.

Don’t be discouraged if the number of hits doesn’t take off right away. As it is often said, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither are successful websites. Article marketing will help the search engines tie the information that the human users are searching for to the quality information contained in the articles on or about your site.