Back in the “old” days of a couple of years ago, search engine optimization (SEO) was all about keywords. Repeat the same phrase fifty times on your homepage and your site would pop up when that phrase was searched in Google. Thankfully for consumers and entrepreneurs alike, the search engines have wised up to such practices. With the creation of more detailed and precise algorithms, Google has come up with better ways to highlight the most relevant and trusted websites.

Just Because You Build It…

Creating a beautiful website with groundbreaking information does not guarantee high site traffic. Once the website is ready to be unveiled to the public, it is time to begin a serious marketing campaign to attract the eyes and ears of interested consumers. The best way to get this kind of exposure is to rank high in the search engine results pages (SERPS), and the best way to climb in the SERPS is to build backlinks.

Backlinking to Your Site

A “backlink” is a link from a website that leads readers back to your website. Sometimes it is a highlighted link in the middle of an article. In other cases, it may be the link in your Resource Box, at the end of an article you have written. When that article is distributed and published on other sites, the link leads readers back to your site.

The importance of backlinking can’t be over-emphasized. When a backlink to your web site from a popular and relevant site is created, Google tags a date to it, and records the actual phrase used in the link. Google then saves this information in order to establish rankings.

Getting the Most Out of Backlinks

It’s important to understand that backlinking is more about quality than quantity. The search engines operate under the assumption that not all links hold equal weight, and a backlink (also known as an “inbound link”) from a highly popular or well known site has more clout than a link from your Uncle Ted’s garden photos.

Here’s what Google has to say about how it uses backlinks to determine your page rank:

“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves ‘important’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important’.”

So while having every member of your extended family create a link to your website from their own sites might be a great way to keep Aunt Alice up to speed, it won’t get you much love from the search gods.

How to Get Other Sites to Link to Yours

So you know how Google uses backlinks to come up with its search engine rankings. You also know that backlinks on popular, respected sites will boost your SERPS. Now the question is: how do I get those sites to link to my site?

Article marketing is an incredibly effective way to do this. When you create informative, unique content in the form of reprintable articles, websites pay attention. Plenty of well-established websites publish content from article marketing databanks, to constantly offer their site visitors fresh information. When one of these sites, or any of their visitors, publishes one of your articles, an automatic link back to your website is included and bingo, a backlink is born.

Distribute more and more articles around the Web, and you gain a steady stream of fresh, highly relevant backlinks over time. The search engines will notice, and you page rank will go up. It’s that simple.

And higher search engine ranking means more eyeballs on your website. Link simple.

Black Hat SEO

A fairly common black hat search engine optimization tactic is to build multiple websites on a general theme. The sites are then cross-linked to other sites in the same network, and would also include one-way links to the primary site with varying anchor text. The whole aim is to give one or more sites a huge boost in search engine results pages (SERPs), and for it to also benefit from additional traffic flowing from the various network sites.

People undertaking such methods generally create the websites with automated tools, use scraped content from other peoples websites, and most of the sites have no purpose other than to drive traffic to the primary site.

White Hat SEO

First it is important to understand a little about linking structure. I am not going to go into excessive details.

It is widely understood that internal linking on any website can represent as much as 50% of the page rank attributed to any single page within a site. How your pages are linked together, for which terms, and whether links are reciprocated all play an import role in the calculation.

If I told you that there are hundreds of websites on the internet, with very high page rank on multiple terms themselves, who would be willing to create a niche portal within their pages, highly optimized for your website, niche and keywords, it is something you would probably be willing to pay for.

We are not talking about a simple directory site. We are talking about high quality content pages, that will pass on pagerank to your site, plus a central hub, similar to a home page, that benfits from all the content pages linking to it, and that in turn also points directly to your website.

Of course:-

- You will have complete control over the content of each of these sites.

- You will be provided with an interface for managing the site’s contents.

- You will be able to add content whenever you like, on almost any subject.

- They will even act as brokers to encourage other people to create hubs which will also point directly to your website

- Most of these sites have powerful linking structures, that magnify the value of your content, and the links both to your website, and to the central hub.

This is all “white hat”. You will never be penalised for using this tactic by the search engines, and it is permanent! Your traffic hubs will be a permanent fixture. Some of these hubs will disappear, but many more will appear to replace them.

Is this something you would pay for?

You can get this highly powerful promotion of your website for free!

Simply write and submit articles to article directories.

Every day I see questions on multiple marketing forums along the lines of:-

“Does article marketing really work?”

“I submitted an article 2 weeks ago and my search engine results have stayed the same, why?”

“When I submit an article, how long until I will see traffic to my website?”

Describing exactly how this all works in words is very difficult, but lets look at a very simple math formula.

1×1x1×1x1=1

It is not very impressive is it?

You have to remember however that an individual article you publish gains incoming links in a number of ways.

- Snippets from your article will appear on the pages of other articles in the same niche.

- You will have a link in the main topic.

- you will most likely have a link for some time in the RSS feed.

- if a website uses that RSS feed for content, the article on the directory site would gain at least a temporary link, but quite often a permanent one.

So we may be looking at more like

1.3×1.3×1.3×1.3×1.3=3.71

Some of the numbers however are going to be bigger or smaller, depending on the authority of the page linking to the article, the number of links from that page etc.

You might well have to use addition rather than multiplication when regarding many aspects of a real formula.

What is important however is that not only is each individual article you publish gaining in pagerank, but also your author profile.

Lets take some examples.

These are the current top 5 article authors listed at Ezine Articles:-

Lance Winslow 2029 Articles Jeff Herring 340 Articles Tim Gorman 306 Articles John Mussi 303 Articles Dennis Siluk 286 Articles

Now do a search for any of those author names in Google.

Every single result has a reference to their Ezine Articles profile within the top 3 positions.

This isn’t true in every case. Well known (and popular for good reason) internet marketer Willie Crawford’s profile only appears at the bottom of the first page, but he has hundreds of links pointing to his popular websites, and has a baseball player competing for ranking.

Profile pages concentrate and magnify the linking benefit of every article you publish, thus the links from a profile page carry a lot of weight.

Some author bio pages allow a lot of customization. Most allow you to have some text (which can be keyword targeted), along with website links. A few even allow you to set anchor text for every link in your profile.

Thus to answer all the questions I see every day on various marketing forums.

- Yes, article marketing does work.

- the more articles you submit, the more effect you will have from using articles as one form of marketing. A hub with a single page has very little weighting. A hub with 10, 20 or even 100 articles will carry an immense amount of weight, and having lots of hubs pointing to your websites will have a massive effect on search engine results.

- you might see an immediate burst of traffic within a few days of when you submit an article, however article marketing is a short, medium and long-term solution.

Short term it can be a fast route to having a website spidered by search engines. Medium term, you will gain some exposure within your niche as other sites and ezines publish your content. Many of them don’t write about your topic every day. Long-term is really up to you. The more quality articles you write, the larger your hubs will become. Large article hubs pick up traffic from a larger variety of search engine traffic, but also make your author bio more prominent, thus magnifying the value of external links placed there.