Gaining High Quality Backlinks is at the heart of an effective organic Search Engine Marketing campaign. Writing and publishing an informative article is just one of many ways for a business owner to gain these valued links. Anything worthwhile does not come easy. If you have come to the conclusion that a portion of your future business must come from internet leads, then it is time to sit down with a business consultant that understands how to best leverage these online resources like Article Directories, Press Release Repositories, Social Bookmarking Tools and of course the more popular Social Media resources like Twitter & Linked-in.

It might be best if I shared with you a few examples.

By now you must recognize that internet savvy buyers are using keywords to find the products and services they seek. Therefore you should be using these same keywords in the articles you are writing to capture their attention when they search…and to let the search robots know how to properly index your articles and online content. We do this with article titles, headings, buzz words peppered into your article and most importantly …the anchor text you use in the link back to your website.

One of our clients is trying to do more with commercial and corporate clients in the Philadelphia region. Therefore, we wrote an article titled:

As you can see, the article Title uses two different keywords that a savvy searcher may use to find answers to their questions. After thoroughly researching the topic, interviewing the client, we wrote a 500 word article that answers the questions an interested searcher my find valuable. Within the body towards the lower 1/3rd is two keyword phrases we have already decided is important to this webpage on the client’s website…including a Geographical phrase to add significance to local search.  

Excerpt for the original article:

Not all directories are considered equal; in fact many are a complete waste of time from either an SEO perspective, user experience, Page Rank Value or Traffic Value. There may also be duplicate content penalties  should you be posting in more than one…be careful to make sure each article you publish is unique.

Here is a listing of the Top 50 Article Directories  based upon SEO value.  They are not all easy to use and some may have very strict publication policies. For our example, I have selected # 7 on our list although I do favor many others. GoArticles  has a decent pagerank of 4, offers good visibility and a wonderful user experience. To support this effort, we have also created a Squidoo Lens  that adds importance to the original article with a link to the GoArticles original content and Squidoo also has a very high link value of its own.

Have a plan! Just posting an article is not enough. It is time to bring awareness to your work of art. It is time to share with the community. Share Share, that’s Fair is how I raised my children and they are better people today for that early interaction. The internet is a better place when you share valuable information openly. Keyword: Valuable

The hope is that your article goes viral…but don’t hold your breadth. You never do know how it will take off. It could be a slow news day…let’s keep our fingers crossed. I’ve had articles that became the “Featured Article” for a day and it increased a client’s website traffic 500% for that specific day.

Social Bookmarks are great tools to share and promote your article. There are many and each requires you to create a profile and participate in the community. For our example, I started the sharing process in an older news bookmarking tool called Reddit.com  which has delivered great results over the years. Some of the newer tools are superior in many ways but I still like this tool very much. We were also able to add 3 more links to the client’s website by commenting on this bookmark.

Then we created a Bookmark in Digg.com  (2nd most popular bookmarking tool), but not to the article…to the Reddit.com posting. The World Wide Web is about the connections we make and the Reddit post is a Hub for this part of our strategy.

Did you know that a Twitter Search is more popular than a Search in Ask.com or AOL? Therefore, I posted a carefully crafted 140 character message in twitter. Not so much that my followers would take action but also so that if someone searched for anyone commenting on “Business Catering Philadelphia”, they might find our link back to the article via the Reddit.com post.

Next week I will be leveraging Linked-in, Twitter and Facebook for some very targeted promotions linking directly to the Article. This first phase is designed to get the “Article out of the Mud”.

At the end of the day, all of this activity, done over the course of time in a natural way, slowly moves your websites listing in Google, Yahoo, Bing and all the others. A smart internet marketing team set’s the client’s expectations properly that this is not a route to overnight success. Article marketing is just part of the overall marketing mix…but a crucial to the success of the overall campaign.

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