Article marketing is a buzz term at the moment since everybody knows that if you know how to write articles then you can make money writing content, not only for your own website, but also for those of others. Never have article ghost writers been in greater demand for articles used in website promotion.
And why is this? Because of the emphasis Google and other search engines are not only putting on articles as web page content, but also because they are looking upon article directories as excellent sources of good content, and an article on a good directory is worth its weight in gold in terms of link popularity.
To Google, link popularity is a measure of how relevant and important your web page is to the keyword it is based upon, and therefore an important aspect of the optimization of your web page for a high listing in search engine results pages for your keyword. The important term here, then, is ‘keyword’.
The Importance of Keyword Research in Article Marketing
Without the right keyword, your article might never be read: at least not read by those people you are targeting, and when that happens your landing page that is contained under the link in your author’s resource box will likely be irrelevant to those that click through to it. Finding the right keyword is one of the best website promotion techniques available to you.
It is important in article marketing, therefore, that having decided upon the topic of your article, you find out the best keywords to use with it. You can choose keywords in three different ways:
a) The most popular, so that you have a large number of people seeking your keyword,
b) The one with least supply, so that your competition is as low as possible, or
c) A combination of each so that you have an average demand with as low a supply as possible.
Although most keyword courses will tell you that the third option is best, it actually depends upon what you are using the keyword for. It is absolutely correct that you should choose a keyword with maximum demand and minimum supply to use on a web page, where you are competing with every other web page on the internet providing the same type of information. However, such keywords are no longer easy to find, and although they are there if your dig deeply enough, you often have a decision to make.
Long-tail Keywords
For web page purposes it is frequently more profitable to seek a large number of what are known as ‘long-tail’ keywords, consisting of several words (in internet parlance a keyphrase of 5 words is nevertheless still referred to as a ‘keyword’). You then design a web page for each so that you can get the bulk of search engine users of these less popular keywords to your web pages.
You could easily end up with more visitors to your website than if you designed one page for a more popular keyword, but with a lot of competing web pages so that you get only a very small proportion of that traffic to your site.
Article Marketing Provides two Sources of Traffic
With articles, however, you have two sources of traffic. One is from organic search engine searches, as a result of which your article could appear high in the listings. This is because the directory pages that hold your articles are themselves scanned by Google and other engines, and can themselves be listed. In such cases, you should be seeking competitive keywords, so that you have the most users but with the fewest other websites offering the same keyword.
However, the second is the article directory itself, and in spite of what you might read some trying to tell you, article directories are read by many people. Those that say nobody reads the articles on the directories are talking tosh because I can have any of my articles read by over 2000 people over the directories I submit to. 150 reads is common on Article Avenue, and I can get even more on EzineArticles. It’s probably a lot more than 2000 over the 100 or so directories, ezines and emails addresses to which my articles are submitted.
What I am coming to is that article directories have their own search boxes that people use to find articles on their niche, and that is where you need to use the most popular keywords, and not the most competitive. Supply doesn’t matter so much as demand in this case. Website promotion involves an understanding of the medium you are using.
Article Keywords are of Two Types
So, to finish up, choose a keyword for your article that has massive demand, irrespective of supply, and another that has a good balance between supply and demand – at best lots of supply and no demand (though you won’t find that it is the Nirvana).
But you get the idea: cater for both the search engine listings for your article and also the terms that the directory users will use when searching for articles. Get both right and you will maximize the traffic to your website by virtue of your article. Improve your website promotion techniques by learning how to write articles using the right keywords and you will make the most of article marketing to your benefit.
