How To Tell If Your Article Marketing Campaign Is Working

Whenever people try to make a difference in their website's traffic and search engine rank, there is a common tendency to want to see results as soon as possible. This is entirely natural--after all, if you're going to be putting time and work into an endeavor, you want to be sure that your efforts are paying off.

A crucial habit of successful link building and traffic building campaigns is being able to accurately perceive results.

How can you tell if your Article Marketing campaign is working?

Before starting your next Article Marketing campaign it's a great idea to do some pre-work and gather some information about your website.

Why?

In order to gauge your progress, you need to have an accurate idea of where you're starting from. Here are the specific piece of information that you need to jot down (or keep in a spreadsheet).

1) How many backlinks does your website have?

You can see how many backlinks your website has by going to Google and typing the word 'link:' (followed by a colon) and then your URL. The results will list websites that are linking to your site and you can see the total listed somewhere near the top of the page.

For Yahoo, use the free stats tracking tool called Yahoo Site Explorer to discover your backlinks.

2) What are your rankings for your keywords?

Do a search in Google for each one of your keywords. Where is your site showing up in the results listings?

Now, your goal is to be in the #1 or #2 position, or at least appearing on the first page, but if you're just starting to marketing this site there is a good chance that you're further (perhaps much further) down in the rankings.

Find your site ranking for each keyword, and make a note of it. If you are un-ranked, that's okay--you're about to change that!

3) What is your PageRank?

PageRank (PR) is Google's way of indicating the authority of a web page. The ranking goes from 0-10, where 10 is the best.

You can see your PageRank by installing the free Google Toolbar at http://www.toolbar.google.com . Then hover your cursor over the PR indicator, and you'll see the PR of your website. If your website is new or never been marketed before, you may have a very low PR or even a zero.

It is not necessary to achieve a PR10 to have a top ranking site in search engine results, so don't feel bad if you're site has a low PR. As the authority of your site increases, so will your PR. PageRank isn't everyting, but it's one way to measure progress on your website.

4) What is your website traffic?

Most likely you have some sort tool for traffic and other stats tracking for your website. Look up what your traffic was from last month and make a note of it. That is your traffic baseline.

As you're doing your Article Marketing campaign, you should update this information every month. Each one of these measurements in themselves does not hold the entire picture to a website's progress. One month your traffic may go up, but your ranking for one of your keywords goes down--and then the next month it may switch back.

By keeping track of a variety of indicators about your website, you will have a more 'big picture' view of your website's health.

When Can I Expect To See Results?

Now, don't expect to see a huge difference right away--when you start any link building effort (and Article Marketing is a link building tool), it will likely be several months before you see any change or impact in the above bits of information.

Before you can see a change in these stats, Google and the other search engines need to re-evaluate your website based on the incoming links. Search engines usually do this re-calculation every 3-4 months, so it will likely be 3-4 months before you see much of an impact from your efforts.

If your website is brand new, you will need to wait for your site to be indexed and then your links calculated, and that will usually take a little bit longer. In my experience it can take a brand new website about 5 months for the backlinks to show up in Google.

During this time, you should be marketing your site by submitting articles every month.

Consistency is the key to long term success with Article Marketing--if you are faithful to your article submissions and do them every month without fail, you will see success faster and the impact will be more dramatic.