SEO Content Solutions

There are several reasons why we often recommend that clients pursue article marketing: to establish themselves as industry experts, to increase awareness of their products and services, and to build backlinks to their websites. The first two are fairly obvious, which is why we are going to focus on the third in this post.

Starting an article marketing campaign does not guarantee links. In fact, it is entirely possible to achieve absolutely no linking benefit to your website — and it is amazing how many people are doing just that. Here are some tips to optimize a distribution article for maximum SEO benefit:

Choose Keywords Wisely

Keywords are the search terms that your readers or customers use to find your website. Knowing which keywords you wish to target is one of the single most important components to your Internet marketing campaign. When done correctly, keyword research will be able to pinpoint which keywords your competitors are targeting and which keywords are more easily mastered than others.

Choose one primary keyword to target in your article, as well as 2-4 related keywords to sprinkle throughout. Using these related keywords helps the search engines get an even clearer idea about the topic of your article. Believe it or not, search engines can tell the difference between a keyword that appears on a page of many unrelated terms and one that appears with terms related to its topic.

Using Keywords In Your Title And Summary

You should use the keyword in the title of the article whenever possible — trying to position the keyword toward the first part of the title. For example, a title that reads:

Article Marketing: 3 Things Strategies for Achieving More Visibility

Vs.

3 Things Strategies for Achieving More Visibility with Article Marketing

Using keywords in the title is important because the title often becomes the title tag and sometimes the URL of the web page. The title tag and URL are two of the most important pieces of a webpage that help search engines identify the topic of the content. Not only does the title tag give the search engines a critical tip as to your topic, but the title tag usually becomes the dark blue title that appears in the search engines results page. This is why it is essential to create article titles that not only include keywords, but that also captivate readers. A good, solid, intriguing title can make the difference between your article being seen and being overlooked.

The summary of your article often becomes the Meta description for the page on which it’s published. The Meta description is usually the short summary that appears in the search engine results page beneath the title. The same logic that applies to writing captivating, keyword-rich titles also applies to writing summaries.

Using Keywords In The Body And Author Bio

When writing articles for article marketing, a good target keyword density is between 1.0% and 1.3%. Trying to “over optimize” by using keywords at a higher percent density can cause the article to be rejected by many publishers.

It is also very important that you use your main keywords as anchor text whenever the online article distribution site will allow. Google uses anchor text to determine page ranking. When you use your keyword as an anchor text, you are essentially telling Google (and the reader) what your website is all about.

The author bio is the most important place to use keywords. Many article submission sites allow for anchor text in the ‘about the author’ bio - and taking this opportunity critical. When creating a bio with anchor text, it is beneficial to include two links: one link to the homepage in a main keyword, and a link to an internal page using the keyword the internal page is targeting.

We see many businesses make the mistake of only building links to their homepages. This is a missed opportunity! It is very important to build links to a site’s internal pages — in fact we recommend that an article be written and distributed linking to any new pages created. The backlinks generated by that article will help establish the new page with the search engines.

By choosing to target the right keywords, using your main keyword in the titles and subheads of an article and of course linking to your website with anchor text keywords, you will effectively be using article marketing to build a backlink campaign for your website.

When you write articles for marketing purposes, it may be tempting to stuff them with keywords in hopes of getting them noticed faster and ranked higher. But with article marketing, a very high keyword density is actually detrimental: people reading articles are looking for useful information, not your promotional spiel. The companies that publish articles know that, and screen content accordingly. Articles are rejected every day for being too self-promotional.

Many clients want to know why article marketing is helpful if it doesn’t promote their particular products or services. It may seem counterproductive to create articles that don’t specifically reference your company, but in fact, article marketing promotes your company by being highly useful to readers.

Benefits of Objective Articles

Even when an article doesn’t directly reference your company in the text, it will discuss some aspect of your products or services. Efficient article marketing may mean a “how-to” or “benefits of” article that leads the reader to desire what you provide. Regardless of the topic or content, all articles directly benefit you by:

• Providing backlinks to your site in the “about the author” portion of the article
• Establishing you - and your company - as an authority on the topic
• “Selling” the reader on need for the product. Once a need for your product has been established, your link is right in the footer and able to supply.

Using Keywords to Inspire Interesting Topics

One of the most commonly made mistakes in article marketing is choosing a bad topic. Many writers have difficulty looking beyond the marketing aspect of the article to the objectivity, and end up with articles that are too self-promoting or simply not interesting. When writing an article, creating interesting content is absolutely vital.

When search engines consider articles, they always look for how useful a particular article is to a user. The most self-promotional articles are usually the worst ranked: search engines know the difference, and act accordingly. In this age where search engines are smarter, the old rules of marketing no longer apply.

The goal of your article should always be to provide useful information to searchers - don’t worry about promoting your company in the article. Leave that for the author bio.

Some good article topics include:

• How To…
• 3 Ways To…
• Comparisons of 3 or more different products/solutions
• 3 Things to Consider Before…
• 4 Reasons Why…
• A Unique Solution for…
• A Guide to…
• X vs. Y: Which is Right for You?

Even if a topic isn’t obviously promotional, it should always be slanted toward the product your company offers. If it’s comparing two items, simply have the article conclude that your company’s item is superior. Build up the need for a given product or service through your topic and body text, and you will effectively increase demand and traffic on your company’s website without mentioning them once in the text.

Just the other day, I read a very effective article that focused on how to create an effective display at a trade show. As I was reading through, the article made me realize that I didn’t have the necessary skills or experience to make a professional looking trade display. So I promptly followed the link in the author bio at the bottom of the article and looked at a website that could create one for me.

For this reason, how to articles are particularly useful for service industries, or companies offering products that are hard to make or inefficient to produce anywhere else. Many people think they can do something themselves fairly easily. But if they discover how truly complex a process is, or how potentially substandard their results could be, they may very well decide to hire a professional. And to reach a professional, they have to look no further than the bio of that very same article for a convenient link.

The Importance of the Title in Article Marketing

Once you have an interesting and informative topic, you need a title to match. Make sure that your title contains the keywords for your article: these titles often become part of the URL or title tags for the article’s webpage, making them a powerful indicator to search engines. Many search engine web crawlers use title tags to get an idea of the topic of the article. Search engine spiders need to recognize that your article has relevant, interesting content for their searchers. More importantly, your headline should appeal to humans. Brian Clark has a fantastic post on Writing Killer Headlines that is definitely worth reading.

The title tag is also commonly used as the linked title of the page itself. It needs to be compelling, because it is often this title that searchers use to decide whether or not to visit a page. If you write an interesting and relevant title, searchers are much more likely to click through and read your text.

When you unite a compelling title with interesting and objective text, you will produce an article that is accepted by distribution sites and attractive to readers. With the right touches, article marketing is a crucial component of any SEO strategy.

As an SEO copywriter or anyone with a blog or a website that drafts content in Word before publishing online, your SEO strategy must begin with your MS Word document. Though you may not realize it, if you don’t have Word set with the proper options, however, it turns from a useful writing tool into a big handicap.

There are options in Word which look great on a computer screen, but become jumbled and confused when translated into web programming language. Before you start writing, it is best to begin by making a few small but vital changes to the setup of MS Word.

Apostrophes, Dashes, and So-Called “Smart Quotes”

Have you ever noticed how apostrophes and quotation marks become bent so that they frame a quote, rather than simple and straight as they appear on the keyboard? This is the work of MS Word’s “Smart Quotes” system. This system is beneficial to your document’s appearance in the text, but causes problems when you try to transfer that text to the web.

In the same way, whenever you type one or two dashes, MS Word will automatically turn those dashes into one elongated dash. This is useful when you’re only worried about how your content will look in MS Word or as a printed document. But when you are writing as part of an SEO strategy, it can be problematic.

Whenever your document includes Smart Quotes or elongated dashes, weird text will show up when it is transferred to your website. If you have ever seen a site with “??” in the middle of a word, or “//” where quotes should be, then you know what I am talking about! That is the result of improperly formatted MS Word text. More often than not, the company doesn’t even know the embarrassing problem exists.

Luckily, we can completely avoid this problem by changing a few simple settings:

1. Go the “Tools” menu and select “Auto Correct”
2. Select the “Format as You Type” Tab.
3. Under the “Replace As You Type” heading uncheck: “Straight Quotes” with “Smart Quotes” and “Symbol Characters (–) with symbols”

With a few clicks, your SEO strategy will be protected with proper formatting of every future document you create.

Proper Web Style Formatting in Word

Your writing style may be excellent, but if you don’t have the style formatting toolbar in web set up properly, you’ll be causing hours of work for the other members of your SEO strategy team. Whenever you are doing SEO writing, resist the temptation to touch that style formatting bar.

Always set your formatting style to NORMAL when you use Word.

All too often, SEO copywriters use tricks that look nice in Word - things like putting double spaces after single returns, or adding additional spaces after lines. This looks nice in the typed text, but none of it transfers into the HTML editor.

Whoever is tasked with implementing the web development part of the SEO strategy will have to completely reformat the text, a time consuming process that can be easily avoided. Simply use the settings recommended before, and then highlight your text after it is written to check for any irregularities. If you see extra spaces around the line breaks, something has gone wrong with your settings.

To ensure that your document does not have any extra Word Doc formatting:

1. Select “Format” and “Paragraph” from your toolbar
2. The “Indents and Spacing” tab should be set to single spacing with 0 spacing before and after lines.
3. The “Line and Page Breaks” tab should have nothing checked other than “window/orphan control”

From MS Word to the World Wide Web

Once you have set up word properly for your SEO strategy and written the content, the last step is actually transferring your text onto the internet. When you work with a site such as Wordpress or Joomla, you will be working with a type of text editor known as WYSIWYG. WYSIWYG means What You See Is What You Get - but to an SEO copywriter, it means make sure that you put your content in the HTML tab, NOT the visual editor. If you paste your text directly into the visual editor, Microsoft Word will automatically add a lot of confusing and undesirable HTML code without your knowledge.

When you paste directly into the HTML tab instead, you avoid all of this useless and confusing extra content. If you don’t use the HTML tab, the extra code will make it more difficult for search engine web crawlers to access your site, making your entire SEO strategy less effective. The extra code effectively becomes a roadblock, masking your true keyword density. If the web crawlers can’t determine keyword density, then they won’t read your content as it was written.

A Few Small Steps Make One Big Difference

When you make these few changes to your MS Word formatting and internet upload practices, you will save your programmers hours of work in the long run. Your content will be readable by the search engines, allowing for proper ranking and effective SEO strategy.