Basic Article Marketing - Link Building 101

If you want an internet presence for your business; and who doesn't?; it's not enough to simply have a website that can't be found by any of your potential customers. You need to promote your site and one of the best ways of doing this is by using article marketing link building techniques. To give your site visibility on the many search engines that will drive customers your way, it requires that you have a link building program that establishes many links back to your site. Generally, the more the better. As well, these links will become a valuable source of traffic for you.

Before you start with the links, you first need to research and select the best keywords for the niche you are competing in. You will already have established at least the main ones. These will be the keywords that your main page was optimized for. But, don't stop there. Expand your keyword base for linkbuilding purposes to include some of the less popular choices that can still attract traffic to your site. The exact words and phrases you use are entirely your choice. In making the selections it's best to utilize a keyword tool that reports the search popularity for each term you consider plus how much competition you will face for that term. The most popular terms obviously have the most conversion potential but they can be exponentially more difficult to gain a visible position with. Unless you are prepared to conduct an aggressive campaign it is sometimes better to select less popular keywords that you can expect to rank for more easily.

Not only do you need to generate a framework of links to get you going, over time you need to continually add links so that there is an ever-growing bank of them with fresh ones being added with some regularity. Even if you were to link build to the point that you achieved satisfaction with your search rankings, you can be sure your competitors are doing the same thing. Therefore, if you were to stop adding, the competition would eventually surpass your arsenal of stagnant links and ultimately outrank you. Not good enough!

Don't make the mistake of thinking that "a link is a link". Not all links are equal. There are a number of factors that you need to consider when building your link text that will serve you well in achieving higher rankings. First and foremost is the anchor text. You could decide to pick the most popular keyword and concentrate on generating links back to your main page that way. Eventually you will have to cycle through your keywords to achieve a broader range of ranked terms. So, use your keywords for the anchor text, make sure the keyword is relevant to the article subject and also that it's one of the words for your main page.

I'll only make mention here because the subject is quite deep and somewhat controversial, the quality of the content that contains your links is critically important to the value of the link you end up with. There are a number of things that come into play here, one of the most prominent being duplicate content. As the web is being crawled by the search engine spiders, they will index at least the first occurrence of a page found to contain content deemed not already in existence elsewhere on the web. That would be the unique version of the content. It's said that unique means at least 40% new although some say 30% is the number for this. Well, if you want to parse that further, let's just say that it could mean different things to different people. One thing for sure, what does matter is that the search engine spiders see the content as unique and how exactly each one of the search engines measures that is as different as it is known only to the engines themselves. The bottom line is that you have some leeway and what matters is that a search engine indexes the page with your content. If it doesn't, unique content could be the issue.

In summary, I have only scratched the surface of some of the more important considerations for building links for your article marketing campaign. If your links end up on a page and the page gets indexed by the major search engines you have done a good job. By virtue of the page being indexed, you have created a link with some reasonable value in support of your site against the keywords the link is built around. Get some more like that and watch your site rankings grow. Meanwhile, watch for more detail on this on other article marketing subjects coming soon.