Marbella SEO

One of the more recent cottage industries in the search engine optimization (SEO) world is that of article marketing – using articles posted on the World Wide Web to drive traffic to your Web site.

In the previous article in this series we addressed the important steps in search engine optimizing your articles so they receive favorable positioning in Google, Yahoo and Bing. We will explain why it is important to include hyperlinks to your sites, advertisements, products, etc., in your online articles in this installment in the series.

At this point, if you have any degree of article marketing experience, you’re saying, “Well, duh!” to yourself. You must spell out the entire URL of a Web site that you want your readers to visit, and then hope that they are interested enough to type that entire URL in, if you’re writing a marketing article for print. And then hope they type it correctly. Fifteen years ago that would have been no big deal. Today, to some, it’s like asking them to read the entire encyclopedia – out loud. Having a hyperlink in your article saves today’s I-want-it-now media consumers from overexerting themselves.

Seriously, though, a more important reason to have hyperlinks back to your sites, advertisements and products is to allow readers to see the items you are trying to promote in a single click. But THE most important reason is because it creates a very important element of the article marketing optimization realm known as a “back link.” When a Web publisher or blogger links to an outside site, it is because that external site has content that the originating publisher or blogger considers interesting and-or valuable. In the algorithms contrived by search engines to rank Web sites, a key factor is the number of “back links” from external sites. The more external hyperlinks there are to a site, the more valuable and interesting its content is – and therefore the higher ranking it should receive, according to the logic.

All you have to do is post the article you’ve written to the Internet, create the hyperlink, and viola – you have one back link to Web site A. Your next task is to somehow increase the number of back links from other sites, because there are a few billion Web sites in the same boat. (Don’t try making 10,000 hyperlinks from your blog post to Web site A. Since they would all be from the same article, they would cumulatively have the effect of only one hyperlink.)

Perhaps you have heard the term “reciprocal links.” In recent years, it was common practice for webmasters to work with each other to try to maximize their back links through reciprocal linking agreements. (”If you’ll link to my site, I’ll link to yours.”) But the process was very time-consuming. Automated article marketing services have replaced reciprocal linking these days. We recommend Article Marketing Automation. Once you join, you post your articles, create your links, “spin” some text (explained on that site), and your article is sent out to a network of blogs. Gradually, over time, your article is posted on more and more blogs, meaning more and more back links are created – all automatically. You can opt to have no limit on the number of blogs to which your article is syndicated, meaning that the blogosphere is your article marketing tool! In excess of 2,000 copies of our articles had been automatically posted on other people’s blogs within a month of our joining the service.

Bookmark this page so you can check back frequently for more articles in this ongoing series.