Article Marketing is an easy and effective way to promote and generate additional traffic to your website.

To begin in article marketing, all you need are some publishing skills or to employ someone who can write articles on your behalf. Select topics that pertain to your organization and write short, but useful informational articles that would benefit your target audience. They should not be a sales pitch for your organization. For example, if you have a website that sells content management software, you could write articles on the advantages of using a paid CMS compared to an open source CMS. Best practice is to have the articles between 400-600 words in length.

One approach to article marketing is using relevant long-tail, three to five word keyword phrases in your articles and submit them often, so the search engines can pick them up and rank them quickly. Since long-tail SEO keywords are slighlty less competitive than one to two word keyword phrases you may have an easier time getting your articles ranked fairly high in the search engine results.  Also, the title and first and last paragraph should incorporate the most important keywords pertaining to your article. In addition, if  your articles are well written you may also gain the interest of webmasters and ezine publishers. As a result, they may also want to publish your article for their readers which should generate additional traffic and backlinks to your website.

Now for the promotion part, the resource box. This handy little bio at the end of your article is where you are allowed to talk about yourself and your organization. Keep it short, most resource boxes can only contain 3-5 lines, but that is more than enough to add what you need. You should have one line about yourself as the author, a line or two about your organization and a link back to your website.

So, how does article marketing help you attract traffic to your site? Well, you can give these useful, informative articles away for free so that webmasters and anyone else looking for free content can come and copy your article, along with the resource box for use in other places on the Internet. Every time someone picks up your article on their website or blog or in an ezine, you are getting free publicity.

To take full advantage of article marketing you can submit your articles to free article directories like Ezine Articles and other similar websites. There, webmasters and other free content-seekers will browse through the articles and pick up the ones they like and can use. The conditions of use require them to include your name as author and your resource box in every single copy of the article they reprint. Published articles online will continue to produce backlinks and traffic to your website for years after they first appear online.

·         Your most important keyword search phrases should appear first in the title tag. If you must use your company name it should be added to the end of the title tag.

·         Shorter site titles are better than really long ones.

·         Overlap of keyword search phrases in title tag helps you rank for multiple search terms. Example:  <title>Internet Marketing Consulting Services in Massachusetts</title> - This could help you rank for the following combinations: internet marketing consulting, internet marketing services, internet marketing in Massachusetts, internet marketing Massachusetts, etc.

·         The meta description tag should contain your keyword search phrases and be written well. This description  is commonly used by Google for your organic listing of the page. Google may also use your description listing in the DMOZ directory (if listed there).

·         The meta keywords tag no longer factors into your seo ranking. It is used to keep track of the keyword search phrases the page is optimized for.

·         Use an H1 header tag on your page containing the keyword search phrase(s) you are optimizing the page for. This helps reinforce the page title when the search engine bots spider the page. Control the font and size of font using CSS.

·         Use H2 and/or H3 header tags before every paragraph. This helps the visitor when reading your page, but it also helps to reinforce the theme of the page content. Control the font and size of font using CSS.

·         Use bulleted lists and/or bold targeted keyword search phrases. This breaks up page content better and helps with SEO

·         Always write compelling page content for human readers and not exclusively for search engine spiders.

·         Page content should be unique (not copied from anywhere else).  The more content you have the better, but precise word counts not necessary. Page optimized keyword search terms should appear in exact order, close proximity, and sprinkled throughout content

·         Use ALT image description tags with any images listed on the page and use keyword search terms page is optimized for in these descriptions is possible

·         Other SEO best practices:
a) Use Text-based navigation
b) If using graphic navigation, use ALT description tags using keywords that accurately target the theme of the page it links to
c) If site contains along of pages, use keyword descriptive breadcrumb navigation
d) Create and use a site map page that links to every page of your site. This helps the search engine spiders to crawl every page of your website. In addition, create and XML sitemap of the site and submit it to Google Sitemaps for inclusion
e)Link to, and use a cascading style sheet (CSS) for every page of your site