Article Marketing for Rankings

There are essentially 2 ways to get yourself listed on the first page of Google:

• Spend lots of money
• Spend lots of time

No matter what anyone tells you, there's no other way of doing it that's repeatable for any new website. Sure, people will give you examples of how they managed it - once or twice...! These same people will probably want to sell you an over-priced training course so that "you too" can match their uncanny success!

I'm here today to remind you that patience is a virtue! :)

Personally, I'm a huge fan of taking the time to build rankings up slowly using a number of tried and tested methods. One of the best of those is article marketing.

Any time we write an article and publish it on the Web for the purposes of getting a relevant link back to our own site - that's article marketing, and it's almost guaranteed to get you found on Google!

So how do you go about it?

Well, you need a few key things:

• A great title - preferably containing your primary keywords
• An article of 700-1000 words, with your keywords scattered throughout it
• A resource box (more later)
• Accounts with one or more article publishers

The resource box is the key here. You see, the sites where we choose to publish our articles exist in order to syndicate our work to article consumers (such as ezine publishers, other websites, maybe even offline publications, if your article's good enough) and your work is provided free of charge, provided the resource box is included in its entirety! Now, since the majority of these sites don't allow you to put links in your articles, but DO permit links in your resource box, this is where a link back to your website will go. As long as you also include a compelling reason for someone to follow this link, you'll get an added bonus of some additional traffic!

The main point though, is that since these article directories are so popular, having an article (with its resource box) listed here means that Google will know about your site much quicker than it would otherwise. Bear in mind that inbound links are still a good measure of your ultimate page ranking and you should start to see why articles are so good!

After all that, maybe I should go and write some, rather than adding these posts to my blog.....!