Effective Link Building with Article Marketing

by Steve Shaw

When you started your website, you might have thought, "Oh no, I need to have some sort of SEO knowledge to getting a higher rank in Google and get more visitors to my site."

That's what many website owners think, but rest easy--you do not need to be a SEO guru to effectively market your website. Any 'regular' person who owns a website can propel their site up Google's rankings by using Article Marketing as their main marketing tool.

Article submissions are easy to do--all you have to do is write articles on the topic of your website and submit them consistently each month for an extended period of time. With each article you submit, you build a backlink to your site, and on top of that you receive an additional link each time a publisher republishes your article from an article directory.

By consistently submitting articles, you are basically setting up a link building machine for your website. An increase in links can garner your site a higher search engine ranking, and an increased search engine ranking for your major keywords can of course build traffic dramatically for the long-term.

Article marketing IS easy, but that's not to say that it doesn't take work. Especially as you're getting started you may feel a bit overwhelmed by the prospect of writing articles on a regular basis.

Anytime we start a new activity, it's natural to feel a bit nervous at the beginning--that's a good sign that you're about to expand your boundaries and learning something new!

You can DO this, and I'm about to share some tips with you that will help you find your groove as quickly as possible.

1) What should you write?

If you're not sure what to write about, a 'How To' article is always a great place to start


A 'How To' article is a teaching article--think of something in your niche that your target readers would benefit from learning. The best 'How To' articles are broken into steps that are clearly numbered. Readers of web content will usually be skimming articles, so articles that contain numbered lists tend to be reader friendly.

2) How can you be sure that your article will be accepted?

Specific guidelines may vary across publishers, but here are some tips that will help your article be accepted by most publishers:

*Make your article educational, rather than self-serving. That means not using the article body to promote your own services, website or products. The proper place to talk about these topics is your resource box, but in the article body you would stick to objective educational info.

*Be sure that your article is free of spelling and grammar errors.

*Preview your article and test the links in your article (if you've included any) and your resource box to be sure that you've typed the URLs in correctly.

*Most publishers have word count restrictions-- 400 to 1500 words is common range.

If you follow these basic guidelines your article will likely be accepted.

3) What if you just don't have time to do all this writing?

In order for a business to be successful, you need to market it. On the internet marketing your business means driving traffic to your website. If you are serious about your business, you will learn to think of Article Marketing as an integral part of your business operations. Just as you find time to talk to clients and create products, you can also find time to write articles to market your website.

4) How can you tell if it's working?

Article Marketing is a long term marketing strategy, and it will likely take 3, 4, or even 5 months of consistent effort before you start seeing a pay off. This time delay has to do with the way that search engines index sites and evaluate incoming links.

If your site is brand new, it will take several months for Google to realize that it's there, and only after that time will incoming links be evaluated. If your site is already indexed, it will still take 3-4 months for Google to re-evaluate your new backlinks.

5) If the results aren't immediate, why is Article Marketing so popular?

Because it can reliably produce long lasting and dramatic changes in a website's traffic--which is what you're going for!

Let these tips guide you as you write your first articles, and know that the more articles your write, the more comfortable you'll feel with the process.