Online Article Marketing
Online Article Marketing is a highly effective tool used to sell both hard goods and information products to national and international audiences. But does it make sense for a small locally based business to use it as well. In a word, Yes!
Businesses use online article marketing to establish themselves as experts, to drive traffic to a sales page and to build back links.
While the first two are important, they are less valuable to the local business person, after all most readers will not be from your market place. Nonetheless some will be, but that’s gravy.
The real advantage of online article marketing for a local business is to out rank their competitors on the search engines. And that does make a real difference for many.
Each time an article is listed on an article directory or published in an ezine or blog, a new back link is created which the author of the article can direct to wherever they choose.
These back links from multiple sites factor into how some search engines like Google rank your site. A site that has links coming to it from a wide variety of sources is more likely to be seen as highly relevant.
While there are many factors that apply to search engine optimization, in general, the web site that has a lot of back links tends to be ranked higher than a comparable web site that has only a few. Online article marketing is one of the best ways to get a ton of such back links for free.
The key to your success is to identify a keyword that people search for, relevant to your specific business or a product you sell. Write the article about that keyword. Include the keyword in your title. And then use it in the resource box you prepare to go with each article you write.
In the resource box you will tell the reader who you are and invite them to come to your web site. You are usually allowed two hyper links by most article directories. You want to use your keyword in the resource box, and hyper link it to the URL of your web site. Ideally you want it to go to a page on your site dealing directly with the product you are selling.
Such hyper linked keywords are called anchor text. The search bots that roam the internet pay attention to them. By using the keyword, you are letting them know that the landing page you are sending them to is related to the keyword.
Thus when someone in your local market searches for “Primer Paints in Baltimore”, the odds are a little better that your shop’s web site will appear higher than your competitors. And that’s what you want.
Getting good back links is like naming your business AAAPaints in the old days when people used to use the yellow pages. Now they use computer search to find almost everything. And that’s why you should be using online article marketing to build your search engine ranking, even if no one in your market place ever reads them.
For more information on Online Article Marketing go to my blog on Article Marketing. http://ArticleMarketingHint.com