Article marketing is one of the oldest forms of off-site SEO, and for good reason. Despite rumors that it has had its day and is currently useless, article marketing still remains the workhorse of off-site SEO. There are a few tricks to it, though.
Writing articles isn’t just about writing an informative piece of information and posting it to ezine.com or articlesbase.com. Your articles have to be written in a certain way to cull favor from the search engines. There are some misconceptions about how it’s done, though, so let’s explore how it really works.
For years, it was believed that a certain amount of keyword content and density were the key element in getting the article ranked in the search engines. This was true for quite some time, but the search engines are more sophisticated than the days when they looked for just keyword density.
There is no magical percentage of search terms per total words in an article. While it’s important that they’re there, and that you shouldn’t do keyword stuffing, the current algorithm for positive ranking that the search engines use is called “latent semantic indexing.” What is this, exactly?
To put it in layman’s terms, latent semantic indexing checks to see if you’re writing knowledgeably about your subject. It’s not just one set of keywords you’re getting ranked on, it’s several. You have to know the language of your niche in order to get positive ranking.
With that in mind, you can effectively write articles for article marketing. Then you can follow the rest of the steps in article submission. That is, go to ezine.com or articlesbase.com, submit your articles, create an author bio (change it around a little for each article), and make sure you have a link back to your site from the author’s bio.
You will have to create a lot of articles to REALLY get good results, but the great thing is that the links you get from doing this will always be authoritative. Just make sure you follow the guidelines of the article directory you’re submitting to!