How does article marketing work?

Suppose you own a web store on exercise attire. You write a nice article on types of workout shoes and submit your articles to 100-20 article directories. In the article by-line, you add your website’s link or link to a specific product page.

In a matter of days, after your article is accepted and published by the article directories, thousands of websites who pick up articles from these directories publish your article on their web page.

A week or two later, major search engines pick up you article and see hundreds of new links back to your site, contributing to your page rank. After several article submissions, you notice an improvement in your search engine rankings at the next algorithm update. As a result, website traffic increases.

Don’t Just Link to your Home Page.
To get the most of out of your articles, link to a few inner pages that are relevant to your article topic, instead of just putting links to your main site page. This will help you link popularity of your entire site.

Remember: Articles Can Promote Various Things.
Use different articles for different purposes. For example, you could have one article promoting your web site, another promoting workout shoes, or another article linking to your affiliate program’s newsletter signup page.

The best way to submit your Articles.
There are many ways to submit your articles. But the best way is to use Article Submitter, a free to download article submitter software that can submit to 668 different directories. Below is a simple snap shot of this easy to use software.

With Article Submitter you can

• Quickly publish your articles to hundreds of websites!
• Increase your Google rankings by getting quality, 1-way links!
• Submit an unlimited number of Articles!

By using Article Submitter, you get inbound links to your website from established, high ranking article directories. And since the major search engines visit these directories frequently to index fresh new content, your website gets listed much faster.

Also, other marketers may decide to use your article. As long as your tag line, bio, or resource box is left intact, then you will get hundreds of potential Internet users aware of your website!

Best of all, Article Submitter is free to download!

What do you do now? How can you get consistent, real, and natural traffic to your website without shelling out a small fortune?

Publishing your Web site on the Internet is not enough to generate the attention it deserves. But you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars on advertising to get a descent flow of traffic. However, website/web page optimization is a fundamental traffic building strategy you must implement if you want to see more hits to your site.

Most of the time, web surfers use major search engines such as Google or Yahoo to find information. As a result, you have to design your web pages with search engines in mind. Your keywords, title, and context play a vital role in your web site’s rank.

For example, let’s pretend that you have a web page article about affiliate marketing. If your site doesn’t rank in the first or second page or results when doing a keyword search, your target audience won’t find you.

Keyword Optimization
The most important step towards optimizing your pages for the search engines and improving your listing is selecting keywords and/or keyword phrases that best define your web page content.

A keyword is a word that best describes your web page whereas a keyword phrase is two or more words that best describe your web page.

When selecting avoid using general one-word keywords, as you definitely won’t rank high in the Search Engines. The more specific the keyword and keyword phrase the better. For example, if you’ve written an article on affiliate marketing, a poor keyword choice would be ‘affiliate’ or ‘marketing’. A better keyword phrase would be ‘affiliate marketing’ or ‘affiliate marketing methods’.

Put yourself in your visitors’ shoes and imagine what words they will type into a Search Engine to find your site. If you are having a hard time thinking of keywords to choose, try using Overture. Overture provides a wonderful service that enables you to research popular keyword and keyword phrases you can use.

Website Speed
Thanks to high speed cable services, websites takes a fraction of a second to load up. However, according to ARS Techa, 22% of Americans still use a 56K modem for web activities.

While you want your website to be visually appealing, you don’t want to bog it down with useless graphics and junk. After all, if your website takes more than 20 seconds to load up, your visitors will not stay.

How long does it take for your web pages to load up? You can check using this tool.

If your web page takes a little to long to load up, consider using less graphics or scripts. Also, if you haven’t already done so, consider converting your web page from a table based layout to a CSS design. CSS can reduce your web site code size by half. This can increase your website’s download speed and improve your traffic stats.

CSS is very easy to learn. For free CSS tutorials try Tizag, W3Schools, or W3.org.

‘Bad’vertising
Monetizing your website is understandable. However, if you’re going to place ads on your web page, don’t drive your visitors away with too many distruptive ads. Re consider annoying pop up ads and limit banners to 1 or 2. Displaying too many ads can ruin your website’s image. Your visitors are unlikely to return if your website’s polluted with too many banner ads.