Search Engine Optimization And Article Marketing
September 28, 2009 by James Harvey
Filed under SEO
Article marketing has become very popular as an SEO (search engine optimization) marketing method under the recent Web 2.0 phase of ecommerce on the Internet.
Viral circulation of articles via social networks such as ‘Facebook’ and ‘LinkedIn’ on any subject have become immensely popular. This quick popularity of article marketing however has had a detrimental effect on the quality of online content, mainly due to individuals writing low-quality articles as a quick way of achieving exposure. Online blogs have appeared almost overnight full of duplicated, plagiarized content from automated article marketing services.
To write original value making content is a more effective way of promoting your website but it does of course require some increased efforts in researching and creating the content. You are, however, more likely to increase visitors to your site if you have something original. You will also benefit from more links to your site if others consider your content is worth linking to.
A rank in a search engine like Google basically means where your web page comes in the race to get listed when someone does a search for a particular keyword. The web pages that are considered by Google to be most relevant to that keyword and which are also considered the most important are listed in descending order in the search results.
Getting your website listed in Google? Its relatively easy to get a webpage listed in Google’s index – just point a link to it from an already existing website and you will probably find that you can find your site in the index in a few days, depending on how important the existing website is crawled (large, important information-rich websites get crawled more frequently than smaller, newer site). But getting your website listed in Google’s index is the easy part, its getting it to rank well that is the hard bit, since its only when you appear on the first page of results for a frequently searched for phrase that you are likely to get any significant web traffic. The main rule to consider is that while there are lots of guidelines and common-sense rules, SEO is not a hard science and anyone who trys to tell you it is, and can achieve you a number #1 position for $2500 in a short period are generally not to be trusted.
Consider the fact that Google tweaked its search algorithm over 400 times in 2007 should give you an indication that the Google index is a moving target. Also, there are over 100 criteria used in the sophisticated ranking algorithm used by Google to calculate a web page’s rank, and the weighting factor of each may vary on a constant basis.
Search engine optimization (SEO) concerns itself with the order in which webpages get ranked when keywords or phrases are searched for in search engines. More specifically, it is concerned with how you might promote a page to rank higher than its ‘competitors’ by using various techniques. The higher a page is ranked, the more likely that page will draw a greater number of site visitors. For company websites, increased traffic often leads to increased sales, and article marketing has proven to be useful and effective in helping achieve this for many.
