SEO, which stands for search engine optimization, is the central focus of the marketing strategies of the majority of new affiliate websites. Where costs must be kept low, due to scarce funds and low financial commitment, the optimum way to gain organic traffic is by getting your website to the top of the search engine results – if you are successful with this tactic then the search engines can throw a huge amount of targeted traffic your way (its then your job to convert these visitors to sales commissions). There are now thousands of e-books out there dedicated to buy SEO backlinks cheap and beating the Google algorithm and it is certainly true that a few clever tricks can go a long way. I am writing this article to advocate article marketing strategy as possibly the most powerful one of these tricks out there right now.
The two fundamental factors for SEO
To begin with it is important to underline the two main factors leading to high page rankings on search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. These are basically, first, to have a keyword rich and code optimized website, and second, to have a large number of links back to your website from others. These links are rated by the different algorithms in terms of quality, so links from the big websites in your particular industry are given more weight than links from meaningless auto-blogs for instance. I believe article marketing is the ready-made solution which enhances your SEO efforts whilst also offering a source for highly targeted visitors in its own right.
Article marketing for on-website SEO
You should, in the modern era of online marketing, be focusing on article quality, especially for backlink building. This means that, for the most part, your marketing articles should be informative, relevant, in-depth and keyword rich, all of which are, coincidentally or not, the perfect qualities for SEO tailored content. This means that, if your articles are of high quality, you should only need to adapt them slightly to make them a very practical part of internal SEO strategy. I would however strongly advise you avoid publishing duplicate content because the search engines seem to punish the laziness this indicates. However, if you edit your content whilst maintaining the message, incorporating a more direct sales pitch and including those all-important affiliate links, you clearly have a perfect solution to please the Google bots which ultimately decide your search engine fate. I have seen many people who have posted hundreds of articles pointing back to an individual sales page but very often this page still fails to rank highly – quality articles will go viral and the extra hours will pay for themselves after a few months.
Article marketing for backlinks
The second advantage of article marketing is the backlink benefit I have just mentioned. Many people go out link hunting, writing to website owners, paying for backlinks etc. and all with very little return. For the most part this strategy therefore is a waste of time – if you are not backlinks SEO buy the returns will generally be very small and not make a great deal of difference. Having said all this, it is therefore fairly obvious that the more articles you publish the more backlinks you receive in return. I would however point out that quality articles are more likely to be republished and provide the benefits this entails – this ability to go ‘viral’ means that the most read articles on sites like Stumble Upon can bring huge traffic to your website but mean content really is really rewarded over sheer quantity.