Publishing articles on the Internet is a tremendous way to
increase the number of inbound links to your site. As articles
are assimilated into search engine indexes, they also begin to
act as landing pages generating traffic for your site. Whenever
possible, you should publish articles to promote your site.
Article Content
The content of your articles should be directed to the most
basic elements of your product or service. Whenever possible,
try to write ?how to? or ?introduction to? articles. Topics like
these will garner the biggest interest and be picked up by other
sites. Articles that cover finer points of a subject work as
well, but you should expect a smaller readership.
Article Tone
Your articles should be packed with information, not sales
pitches. When writing articles, one tends to concentrate on how
to get potential readers to visit your site. This approach is a
mistake. You have to think of both the readers AND webmasters
that will be looking for articles.
Image you are a Webmaster that needs content for your site. You
go to one of the article directories looking for material to add
to your site. Are you going to select articles that are sales
pitches designed to take your visitors to another site? No. You
are going to select articles that provide your visitors with
some valuable information. Don?t write sales pitches!
Links
Articles are a great way to quickly build the link counts for
sites. The search engines universally appear to like them, a
rare event these days. So, what?s the best strategy for using
links in your articles?
The best linking strategy for articles involves putting not more
than two links in your byline. This is admittedly a personal
preference, but I find more than two links looks ?clunky? and
many depositories won?t allow any more than two.
Regardless, the two links in the byline of your articles should
go to two distinct pages of your site. The first might be to
your home page, while the second goes to a page that is related
to the subject of the article. With each new article, you should
change the links to new pages. This allows you to build link
popularity for both your home page and internal pages of your
site. I have found Google, in particular, heavily favors sites
that multiple pages with high link counts.
HTML v. Text Links
With some depositories, you have the opportunity to place html
code in your bylines. This, of course, lets you avoid typing out
the URLs for your site pages, but should you? I would encourage
you to type out the URLS for one reason. It is important to make
it as easy as possible for Webmasters to republish your article
on their site. Don?t make them figure out the domains of your
hyperlinked text, particularly sub-domains.
In Closing
I have used article campaigns to market many sites. As long as
you go about it correctly, you should be able to do the same
thing for your site.
About the author:
Halstatt Pires is with MarketingTitan.com- an
Internet marketing and advertising company. To read more
marketing articles, visit MarketingTitan.com.
|
