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.

Most business have some sort of Internet presence, a website, blog or just advertising.  For businesses with websites, how do you get more traffic to your site?  Google, Yahoo and now Bing are the major search engines out there where prospects and customers will generally go first to find a type of business on the Internet.  When a keyword or phrase is typed into the search engine search box, it will serve up all of the pages that are relative to that word or phrase.  The order that the search engines serve up these pages is by relevance or “importance”.  The search engines give “ranks” to all of the pages out there and pages or websites with the highest “page ranks” will be on the first page of the search results.

According to Wickapedia The name “PageRank” is a trademark of Google, and the PageRank process has been patented (U.S. Patent 6,285,999). However, the patent is assigned to Stanford University and not to Google. Google has exclusive license rights on the patent from Stanford University. The university received 1.8 million shares of Google in exchange for use of the patent; the shares were sold in 2005 for $336 million.

Google PageRank Defined

Google assigns a numeric value of  0-10 for each webpage on the Internet.  This PageRank value is Googles way of denoting a sites importance.  The PageRank is determined by a logarithmic scale, depending on the links to a page.  In other words, every page that links to a specific website is a “vote” for that page.  If the PageRank of the site that links to a specific website is high, it’s “vote” carries more weight and helps to boost the receiving pages PageRank.  It is like “who you know” in the Internet Realm.  In other words, a page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself.  If a site has no links to it, it is deemed unimportant to Google and will receive a 0 PageRank.

How to Increase Google PageRank

1. Get links to a site from other high ranked sites.  These incoming links are referred to as back links by the search engines.  Be cautious, there are a lot of businesses promising that they will get your website thousands of back links in a few days.  Just having a large number of back links does not give you good PageRank.  The links must be relevant to the websites content.  Google is smart enough to know which links are relevant to a sites content and only counts those.
2. Write keyword rich articles and make the keywords back links.  Submit these articles to high ranked article submission sites.  Sites that specialize in a websites industry may also add these keyword rich articles to their sites.  Businesses should be wary of article sites that accept any type of article; search engines may not view these as quality links.
3. Be sure that the website content uses the keywords that back links have been made out of.  Google gives more credit to sites that have the keywords in the site content, meta data and page title.

Don’t expect a websites Google Page Rank to increase right away. Building a quality back link program and Google SEO program can take time. Page Rank may not be affected for six months to a year. But the work will be well worth it in the long run for a businesses website popularity and Google Page Rank.

Websites are a wonderful way to show people all about yourself, your organization or business.  They can even be your store front to the world.  But what if no one knows where you are or how to find you?

Search engine friendly website design

Making a website friendly for people as well as the search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo and MSN sounds like a daunting task, but it really can be quite simple.

You need to know what are the top words people would use to search for your product, service or yourself on a search engine.  Example: you sell black widgets in Maine.  Someone might search “black widgets, maine” your site would come up!  Why?  Because the content on your page would use that keyword, the images on your page would be named that keyword, links to other pages on your site would use that keyword and in the source code of your website, that keyword would be used.  Sound confusing?

That is why website design should be left to the professionals.  There are a lot of places that you can put up a “cookie cutter” website quickly, but what then?  If no one comes to your site, what is the value of it?

A good place to start is to find an all in one company that will build you a great site and provide internet marketing at the same time.

Please feel free to brows my site to see my work.  If you would like me to help you with a project please feel free to contact me!