How Article Marketing Helps You with Search Engine Optimization

If you have been following this newsletter for a while, you have learned that writing and publishing articles online helps you promote your expertise, gain newsletter subscribers and sell more of your products and services.

However, there is one more reason for business owners get to publish articles online. Few people discuss this reason for marketing article. I think that this particular benefit is so important, though, that I would recommend publishing articles just because of it. So what is it? Writing and publishing articles online helps you get better search engine rankings. It is that simple. Better search engine rankings translate into more targeted web site traffic for your business, which translates into more sales. Who wouldn't like more people, interested in their products and services, coming to their web site?

Here is how publishing articles helps you with search engine optimization:

When you publish articles, each one of your articles comes with a Resource Box. The Resource Box contains information about you and your business. However, the most important thing that the Resource Box contains is a link back to your web site. Web sites and blog owners who reprint your article include your Resource Box with a "live" link back to your web site. Thus, your articles help you generate a unidirectional (one-way) links to your web site.

A unidirectional link points from page A to page B. However, and this is a crucial point, page B does not reciprocate the link and does not point back to page A. Now imagine web pages C, D, E, F and many more, all linking to web page B. Web page B now has incoming links from pages A, C, D, E, F. These incoming links help drive traffic to web page B. Anyone visiting pages A, C, D, E, F will see the links and just may visit web page B while they are at it.

What is even more important is that search engines will also see that web pages A, C, D, E, F link to web page B. Current search engine algorithms place more emphasis on unidirectional links. This means that having many unidirectional links pointing to your web site will improve your search engine rankings.

Writing articles is a good viral way to generate unidirectional links to your web site. When you write interesting, useful and informative articles, many people want to publish them on their web sites and blogs, thus generating a unidirectional link to your site. To take full advantage of the viral nature of article marketing, submit your articles to many article directories. Once your articles are listed in the directories, web site and blog publishers will pick them up from the directories and publish them. There is no additional effort required on your part.

Here are a few additional tips to keep in mind:

Some article directories allow you to only use a link to your web site, such as http://avocadoconsulting.com/rlinks/zarticles Yet others allow you to include some HTML code in your Resource Box. If you can include HTML code, create a link that points to your web site with anchor text. The text should use keywords and information about your web site to further improve your search engine rankings.

Anchor text is the text that you place between the a href tag and end of href tag.

Remember to write articles and submit them to article directories on a regular basis. Not only will you promote your expertise and gain more newsletter subscribers, but you will also get more search engine traffic for your efforts.

About the author: Biana Babinsky is the online business coach, expert and author who helps business owners get better known online, get more customers and make more money by using article marketing. Download her Article Marketing for Profits Audio Guide at http://www.avocadoconsulting.com/rlinks/zarticles to learn how to get more clients by writing articles.