SEO & Article Marketing 101 - SEO for Beginners

Search engine optimization is the key to getting targeted traffic to your website. Targeted traffic is important because you want the traffic coming to your site to be interested and ready for the content you are going to provide them. If your new to the Affiliate Marketing business, search engine optimization is the practice of trying to get your website ranked as highly as possible in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and now Bing. We do this by using a process we call Article Marketing.

Article Marketing is the #1 method of building targeted traffic to your website. It builds backlinks to your site, it generates traffic from article directores, and it can even get your content distributed to other sites, which in turn builds more links and targeted traffic. The concept is fairly simple and can be broken down into 3 step process.

Step 1. Write an interesting article.

This sounds like common sense but a lot of people are confused on exactly what an article should consist of. Many of you may have read in various places on the internet that you need a certain keyword density, or that your keyword needs to appear in particular parts of your article. I don’t hold to these myths. When writing an article for distribution, have the keyword in your title (which it should be because that is what the article is going to be about), and then focus on writing a good quality article that someone might actually want to read.

If you focus on writing quality content about the topic of your choosing, then everything else will work itself out. There is no magic percentage or number of times you should use your keyword. There is no magic formula to creating articles that will make you sales. Simply write articles that you yourself would want to read and you will be well on your way to building traffic.

Step 2. Market the Articles.

Now that you have your article written, you need to get it out there. We do this by submitting our article to various article submission sites. If you are having trouble finding sites to submit your article, just do a Google search for article submission, you should find plenty of results. One thing to remember when submitting the article is to read all of the policies for the particular site you are going to use. Every site is different in regards to how many links they will allow, if any, as well as what kinds of topics they will accept. Most sites will allow links only in the resource block.

It is important that your resource block be used properly in order to make article marketing successful. As I said previously, most sites will allow two links within the resource or author bio box. These two links should be very specific. You want one link to lead back to the main page of your website and the other to lead back to the original source of the article your posting, in other words, the specific URL for that article on your website. This will build you the most consistent and targeted traffic in the long run.

Step 3. Utilize the Traffic

This step isn’t really a part of the article marketing process, but it is important to note. It seems like article marketing is becoming more popular and many people are utilizing it to build traffic, but I am amazed at how many people improperly utilize the traffic they are building. You still need a quality landing page for the traffic you are building. If they read your article, enjoy the content, and visit your site, but the site is a one column black and white mess of words with thirty affiliate links and banners thrown everywhere, that user is going to jump immediately to the back button on their browser. In other words, build a legitimate site, with valuable content so that you can build trust and maybe even capture an email address. This is the best way to utilize the traffic from article marketing.

To sum it all up, article marketing is an easy process. The only catch is that it is time consuming and requires that you be diligent and focused. I can gurantee you however, that if you follow through with this method, it WILL build you targeted traffic that converts. It has worked wonders for countless of my campaigns.