September 30th, 2009 by Bruce

For quite some time now, article marketing has been widely recognised as being one of the most effective strategies for online business. This means of marketing can help develop reputation, improve SEO, and also provide back links to your website for the article readers – who in some instances, might well represent partially qualified leads. The Internet thrives on the presentation of quality information and well written articles can be your organisation’s key contribution. The major search engines value good articles highly, and it’s essential that you compose focused and optimised material for your project.

Once you have compiled your comprehensive list of appropriate keywords for your niche, you should prepare articles accordingly. Invest the necessary time to write truly informative pieces which include your keywords, and then ensure that they’re distributed to an array of top notch article directories and blogs across the Internet. Anchor text-based hyperlinks within the article resource boxes should point back to the landing pages, as specified, on your website.

You should keep in mind that you’ll need to concentrate on your website development, in addition to your article content and distribution, as this is just as important in the grand scheme of things. Your website must be adequately optimised to enable you to get the most out of any article marketing campaign, and to ensure this you should concentrate on several areas:

1. Don’t ever forget that the main reason why people visit your webpage is because they’re looking for information. You should not spend too much time on fancy presentation, complex graphics and flash animation, if it detracts from the overall message.

2. The navigation of your website should be clear and easy to understand. Ideally, your visitors should be able to move from one point or page to exactly where they want to be without any confusion, and for the most part, there should be a fairly logical progression with regard to the presentation of your information.

3. In a Perfect World, it’s best to create a separate page for each and every keyword that you’re focussing on in your article marketing campaigns. In this way, the search engines will match the keyword contained in your article’s anchor link with the keyword optimised on each page.

4. Always make sure that the content of the page is as closely related to the content of the article as possible. Remember, that the reader of the article is being encouraged to visit this webpage by the content of the article itself. He or she should be able to continue this process of discovery, which may be leading them further into your sales funnel!

5. To make sure that the search engines recognise the landing page you have specified as relevant, you should make sure that you:

* Put the exact keywords in the title of your page, as well as in the description.

* Repeat the keywords in the body of the content on the page. It is suggested that you do this to no more than a density of 1%, i.e. 5 times within 500 words of content, so that it appears natural.

* The H1 tag is very important and the keywords should appear here too.

* Specify the keyword and related keywords (sometimes known as secondary keywords) within your meta-data keywords tag.

6. There is increasing evidence that Google is placing a lot of emphasis on synonism and latent semantic indexing. This means that they will be looking for the existence of certain words and phrases within your content, relating back to their large databases of information, so they can accurately judge whether your content is indeed relevant to your primary keywords.

As you roll out your article marketing campaign, there’s a lot to concentrate on. Make the most of each article that you compose and distribute by ensuring that every element of your campaign is optimised. To make sure that you do not miss any of these crucial steps, consider using a Virtual Assistant to make the most of your initiative.

Michelle Dale is The Managing Director of Virtual Miss Friday, an Executive Virtual Assistant who assists businesses and individuals with achieving their professional goals. Want to find out more about online business building success strategies? Contact VMF Now!

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