Article marketing is one of the vital strategies for directing traffic to your site and getting the backlinks that are required for search engine optimization (SEO).  Articles are necessary when you want to market your business in the Internet and this is usually through the backlinks or links that you may be found in the articles that lead to your website.  There are two ways by which article marketing can create a large volume of traffic to your site and thus boost your sales.  First, it lets your gain the backlinks that are vital to SEO whose purpose is to increase the number of visitors to your website.  The other way is through viral or word-of-mouth advertising, which comes into play as your articles gain recognition for being informative and helpful.

Search engines compute the ranking of your website for a particular keyword or phrase that are relevant to the topic of your site.  Maximizing the number of links that direct visitors to your website is an essential SEO technique and article marketing offers an effective way to naturally obtain these backlinks.  Remember that the algorithms used by search engines place more emphasis on naturally created links as a way to counter underhanded SEO methods such as link farms.

People who were able to read your informative articles that you have submitted to publishers of online newsletters and e-zines, may also want to put your articles on their websites.  You can allow them to republish your articles as long as they maintain the backlinks on your articles.  To illustrate, you will be gaining 200 backlinks if 200 people decide to republish your article, which will definitely upgrade your rank in the search engine results pages.

It is but natural that this will become even more effect after some time because more people would have republished your articles.  In time, viral advertising comes into play as the people who have read your articles inform their friends about them.  You become recognized as an expert for a particular field and more and more people would want to read your articles and bloggers may even place links to your site on their posts.  It is likely that the effect will snowball and cause an explosive growth of traffic to your website and your sales as well.

However, it is necessary that your articles are of high quality and provide helpful information or you would have very few readers.  Fortunately, you can make use of quality article writing services if you do not have the time or passion to write them.

Phew, this is a big subject and I need to emphasise it’s not an exact science. But here is what I have learned in my work at the Backlinks clinic:

Authority – explained

The more authority your web pages have the higher you will rank on Google. Authority means that people trust you and your content. The great news is that authorities trusted by humans are also recognised as trustworthy by Google. A great example is the .edu and .gov domain extensions. These domains imply they are credible sources of information and it’s a proven fact that in the eyes of Google backlinks from these domains to your site will contribute authority to your web pages. Another good example is Wikipedia as the contents here are mostly contributed to by group of humans as opposed to a single marketer.

So it follows that authority is very heavily influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative web pages link to your web pages then you receive their apparent trust and as far as Google is concerned you become more authoritative and so the trust in your content by Google goes up.

How Google declares what is and isn’t authoritative is undisclosed for good reason and falls in line with Google’s philosophy of “Do no evil”. The last thing the Internet needs is an individual or a group manipulating the formulae that Google untilzes in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most significant technological asset of our times.

How not to get Backlinks

And on this thought it’s valuable to state some underhand sources and practices of acquiring backlinks that Google not only disapproves of but appears to be acting to ‘classify’ as illegitimate authorities. In no particular order of severity, the common examples are:

• Paid backlinks – hubs where individuals buy and sell backlinks
• Comment spam – entries that have links on web sites that are just not related to the main content.
• Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or otherwise
• Unnatural growth – there are plenty of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t dumb. Any sudden increase in the number of backlinks is going to register on Google’s radar, specifically if it’s a recently registered domain.
• Backlinks from unscrupulous web pages – these are particularly destructive as you are guilty by association – need I say more.

*There is another factor where I may be on shakey ground, but large press properties seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely found significant numbers of the same article over and over again on different web sites with no penalties, I am still monitoring this, only as a percentage of the results I am seeing go against the consistent behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future article….