Gain Customers Through Articles

Article marketing is not a new Internet marketing tool. This marketing tactic has proven itself to successfully bring increased traffic to your website and, subsequently, increased sales. If you are not writing articles about your product or industry start now.

How does this work? The process is easy.

Write content rich articles relating to your website and submit them to "free content" submission sites. The process is easy to do and it will take some upfront time but you know your business. You know your product. You know the value of what you sell for your customers. Put that knowledge in the form of an informative article and it can increase your website traffic, sales and subsequently, your income.

How can article writing boost traffic and income?

Every article you submit to an article directory contains a link to your own website. If your article was valuable to the reader they may choose to click on the link and pay you an unexpected visit. The best way for someone else to market your website is when a webmaster publishes your article on their site for content. Your link remains active and the visitors to that site can read your article and click on your link. The more webmasters who use your article, the better for you.

Continue to write webpage content articles about your product, service, or industry. As the list of your published articles grow larger, and more and more of them are appearing on different websites, the total number of links back to your site increases. Ensure that all the links do not come back to the same page. 'Deep links' means that each article links back to a different page on your website. Choose the page that closely coordinates with your article. The readers of your article are already interested in that topic so linking them back to your site, containing more information on the same topic, keeps the reader as a visitor on your web site longer.

Many of the Readers already have specific things they need but cannot decide yet between the many choices online. When they read one of your articles, gets interested by the contents you wrote, and visits your site they feel like you have provided them with the information they needed and purchase from you. See how easy that is?

The second value of this is that the major search engines are placing a lot of significance on incoming links to websites so they can determine the importance of a certain site. The more incoming links your website has from all your published articles, the more importance the search engines attaches to it. All the new link activity will increase your website's placement in the search results.

Search engines do not just index the websites, they also index published articles. All of the activity derived from your articles gives you a higher ranking which turns in to being closer to the first page when individuals search for your product/service. There are other techniques you need to know, including keywords and keyword phrases, to be as successful with this marketing technique as possible.

If you think about it, only a few minutes of your time is spent on writing one article and submitting to a free content site. In a short span of time that article is distributed to more sites than you can think of. Even before you know what is happening, you are getting more visitors than you previously had. Write more articles, get more traffic. Consider submitting to several article directory sites or use an article distribution service and really watch your web site visits and your sales increase.

If you think you are wasting your time writing these articles, fast forward to the time when you will see them printed and wide-spread on the internet. Not to mention the sudden attention and interest that people are giving your website and your products or services.

Toni Grundstrom is a Freelance Writer. Article Marketing is now one of the best ways to market your website (or should I say let others market your website). Now is the time to begin writing articles for distribution and/or put them on your website as rich content. Turn Your Words Into Marketing Gold

This article may be distributed freely on your website as long as this entire article, including links and this resource box, are unchanged

Do Your Website's Meta Tags Stand the Test

Every well designed website should have Meta tags. You might be asking yourself, "What are meta tags"? The short answer is Meta tags are a set of tags placed in the HTML header of your website to provide information to search engines about your website. You got it; the keyword here is search engines. As stated in a previous article, it is vital that you ensure your website is listed in the major search engines. Let's take this one step further and dissect the two major types of Meta tags.

Description Meta Tag

The description Meta tag is where you want to tell the search engines what your website is all about. You can think of the description Meta tag as the first impression of your website. When someone types in a search term in the search engines and your website is listed as matching that search term, the first thing they will see is the title and description of your website. If your description is not compelling enough your website may be overlooked time and time again. The end result would mean less traffic for you. So, let's take a look at what makes a good description:

1. First and foremost, your description must be relevant to your website. It should convey in a few words what your target audience should expect to get out of using your website. Your description should directly relate to both the title and the body content of your website. With that being said, every page on your website may not necessarily have the same description.

2. Although you want to make sure to use your main keywords in the description Meta tag, you do not want the description to be a complete reiteration of your keywords. The description should be full complete sentences making sure to be careful of any grammatical errors. Remember, the goal is to communicate to real people the essence of your website. To do so you must speak ("write") plain ole English.

3. Your description does not have to be really long to get your point across. The typical description is approximately 15 - 25 words long. This is equivalent to about 2 - 3 short sentences. Although there hasn't been an official word on what the description length needs to be, keep in mind there is only so much space available for your description in the search engine listings.

This list may not be all inclusive. However, it's a great start. To get a better fill of does and don'ts, search the internet using keywords relevant to your website and take a look at what the descriptions look like.

Keyword Meta Tag

The keyword Meta tag is probably the most important. This is where you would formulate a list of words that are directly related to your website. When someone types in a search term that fits your keywords your website could be one of the ones in the search engines listings. Typing in a group of words in the keyword Meta tag isn't as simple as that. There is a methodology to generating appropriate and good keywords that are suitable for your website. Let's take a look at a few things to keep in mind.

1. Don't use keywords that are not relevant to your website. Your keywords should consist of words that specifically describe what your website is all about. So if your website is geared towards web design, you should not use keywords relative to cookbooks. Sounds like common sense. However, you'd be surprised at how many websites use keywords that have nothing to do with their website.

2. You want to use keywords that are found in the body of your website. This increases the relevancy of your keywords. This does not mean that you should have lines of keywords imbedded into your website. Rather you should choose the words that are a part of the natural flow of your content. With that being said, it might serve you better to write the content of your website prior to identifying the appropriate keywords.

3. Generally, there are four areas to consider when incorporating your keywords in the Meta tag and the body of your website. These are density, frequency, prominence, and proximity.

a. Density refers to the number of times keywords appear versus all the words within the website. For example, if you have 500 words on a webpage and 250 are a particular keyword or keyword phase you would have a density of 50% which is way too high. Keyword density for each keyword or phrase should typically be between 2% - 6%.

b. Frequency refers to how often a keyword appears in the webpage. It is believed that the more a keyword appears the more relevant search engines see your webpage for that keyword. However, keep in mind that you do not want too high of a density. So if you want to use the same keyword over and over again make sure to have plenty of content surrounding the keyword.

c. Prominence refers to where the keyword(s) are found in the webpage. To achieve this remember to use your keywords in your title, description, at the beginning of the webpage, and the beginning of sentences.

d. Proximity refers to how close keywords are to each other. For example, consider the following two sentences:

"We design web sites"

"We specialize in web design"

If the keyword used in the search engines were "web design", the second sentence would be a better choice as it has the keywords web and design right next to each other.

There are many free tools on the internet that you can use to determine if your Meta tags past the test. Simply go to your favorite search engine and type in "free keyword analyzer" and see how you measure up.

For more tips for doing business online, visit us at www.doingbusinessonline.net

To your online success,

Nakisha Muhammad (Keyeraines)

Copyright 2008 Keyeraines Unlimited, Inc.

Nakisha Muhammad (Keyeraines), has a 12 year financial background in the mortgage industry. However, she has had a passion for technology starting at a young age. She is a fundamental programmer and web designer. She finds pleasure in researching and sharing her knowledge with others in hopes that they won't have to work as hard to learn what's she's learned. With that she started a website to be a true resource center for online/offline businesses. You can visit it at http://www.doingbusinessonline.net