Link Building Through Article Marketing - 7 Must Know Tips

By: Rex Bush Certfied Search Engine Marketer


1. Keywords

Go to SEO Book.com. You’ll find a free keyword tool. Play around with it. Find some keywords that are popular to your subject area. Use them for topics. Work the keyword in a number of times in the article. Use it in the headline.

2. Titles

Article titles or headlines are critical. One of my first articles that I published with Ezine had a very bland title. It got very few views and was published very few times. Then I read Rosalind Gardner’s “Super Affiliate Handbook” and everything changed. She has a great piece on creating interesting article titles. She calls it “The ‘Secret’ Ingredient Every Article Needs.”

Use numerals in the titles. For example, “8 ways to…” or “7 tips to….” And use words like “avoid,” “how to,” “tips” or secrets”. You can probably find some sources on the internet with ideas on headline writing.

Creating snazzy titles is “must know” information so don’t neglect it.

3. Use Proper Grammar and Punctuation

You want webmasters to pick up your articles and post them on their websites and blogs. They may be turned off by bad grammar or incorrect punctuation. Your article will reflect on their site. So make it look good. Use Microsoft Word or WordPerfect and keep the spell checker and grammar checker on at all times.

4. Proofread

James Michener used to say he was not a great writer but he was a great proofreader. After your article is finished, print it out. It is much easier to spot errors on the printed page. Get a red pen. Read the article slowly and carefully. Pretend you are someone else. A competitor, for example. She would find errors in your text. You can do the same. Fix them.

5. Article Submission

There are hundreds of places to submit your article. My current favorites are Ezinearticles.com and Isnare.com.

Ezinearticles has a minimum word requirement of 250 but is very strict about its editorial guidelines. I have published articles at Ezinearticles.com and each article gets a PR (page rank) 2 from Google. This is good. Very good actually. And Ezinearticles is basically the Harvard Law Review of article publishing.

Isnare.com has a minimum word requirement but is much more relaxed editorially. I find I can publish more articles for my time with Isnare even with the higher word requirement. With Ezinearticles I am continually rewriting to meet their strict standards.

There are many other article repository sites and you can find them with a simple search on Google.

6. Distribution

Just getting the article published in a repository is only half the battle. Some webmasters will pick up your articles from the repositories. But, ideally, you want the broadest possible distribution for your article because that way more webmasters become aware of it and publish it.

One way to do that is through “article announcement lists.” These are mostly Yahoo Groups. You can find them through a search on Yahoo. David Viney also publishes a list on page 159 of his very fine book “Getting to the Top on Google.”

For my purposes I have found I get the broadest possible distribution when I publish at Isnare.com. For a small fee ($2.00 per piece) they send the article out to gazillions of sites. And, I start noticing the inbound links multiplying more rapidly. So I pay the $2.00 and feel it is worth the money.

There are other methods of achieving broad distribution. There is software that Rosalind Gardner recommends and claims to use herself that does the same thing. It is rather pricey but if you are writing a lot of articles maybe it is worth the money

7. Resource Box

This is the area after the article where you can put your info. The article is your “give” and the resource box is your “take” as they say at Ezinearticles. There is a whole technology on how to write a concise effective resource box to maximize your return. You can find some great articles on it at Ezinearticles.com. Be sure to include one of the main keywords from your site in your link’s “anchor text.”

Conclusion

Article marketing can generate massive numbers of inbound links. A nice side benefit is that they will also bring you traffic. It takes some time to learn but it is a solid link building and marketing strategy.