The Art of Article Marketing Part One

Article marketing is all the craze in SEO now a days.  Everyone is writing articles on their products, services and ideas.  But do these articles really help send traffic to your website?

In this series we will take a look at how Article Marketing is bringing traffic to websites through keyword links, expert dialog and just plain old interest.

Why should you write articles?

They make you the expert:  you become the expert in your field.  It gives you and your website credibility.  People will see you name and your website name and begin to associate it with your product or services.  Say you sell widgets and you write and post 50 articles about widgets, they get posted around the internet on article sites, picked up on blogs and maybe even put into print.  Soon people will associate you ad your website as the experts on widgets and go to your website for advise and to purchase.

Drive Traffic to your Website: adding keyword links in your articles will drive traffic to your website.

Beware of SEO Scams

A well planed and well executed SEO program is extremely effective in getting targeted traffic to your website.  But buyer beware.  We have all seen the ads and claims that “For only $200 your website can be number 1 on Google!”  Well, BOLOGNA! Beware of SEO Scams!

What to look for in a reputable SEO program and company:

1. Honesty – do they make promises that seem too good to be true?  No one can promise you that your website will be found on the first page of Google’s Natural Listings in one week.  At best most SEO campaigns may increase your natural listings by 3-4 positions.  Example: Your websites top keyword is “widgets”.  Your website comes up on the second page of the Google search for that keyword search, a good SEO campaign can promise you that your site will now move up 3-5 positions or maybe to the first page.

Link Building

Just how important is it?

Image via CrunchBase

By Antoinette Wakefield

What is all the fuss about links to your website?  Why such a push on link building services?  What in the world is link building?  In this article I will discuss what link building is, the importance of it and how to incorporate it into your Internet Marketing Plan.

Link building is the process of getting links to your website from other sites, especially high traffic, industry specific sites.  Getting links to your web site used to be an easy task, just get as many incoming links to your site as possible, quality and nature or the links was unimportant.  Then link relevance came along; search engines now take into account the quality and relevance of your site’s incoming links.  This makes the process of link building a much more complicated program.  With all of the other tasks that business owners have, link building may not be high on the priority list.  It may be best to hire a professional Internet marketing firm to help.

Twitter

Image via CrunchBase

What the Tweet is it all about?

by Fran Prisco

Everyone is talking about it.  Everyone is signing up for it.  Just what is this Twitter thing all about?  Twitter is quickly becoming the number one spot on the Internet for people to connect.  It is a part of the new Social Media revolution.  Social media is a new way that people discover, share and read news and information on the Internet through social networks or micro blogs such as Twitter.  It is transforming people into content providers, not just content readers.  So how does Twitter fit into this profile?

Social Media Marketing

Image via CrunchBase

The New Era of The Internet

Social Media is the latest buzz online.  With sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and others, we can gather with people all over the world and discuss just about anything.  We can find people from our past, catch up with old friends and make new ones.  We can discuss our jobs, families, hobbies and most important to business owners, the products we buy or are thinking of buying.  We are no longer forced to believe the “In Your Face Advertising” of the past; now we just log into Facebook and find out who likes or dislikes a product we are thinking of buying.  So what does this mean to business owners?  It is a whole new arena for marketing our products and services.

Social media marketing (SMM) is a form of internet marketing which seeks to achieve branding and marketing communication goals through the participation in various social media networks”. Social Media is a shorter top-level term that describes the space overall, and covers the activities around social interaction, content, videos, images and audio exposure.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Image via CrunchBase

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.