Article marketing is a great tool for promoting products and attracting traffic to your website and every internet marketer know the importance of article marketing (commonly known as BUM marketing).

There are few points, if taken care, can maximize the benefit of article marketing.

Purpose of Article Submissions: There are mainly two purpose of article marketing, one is one way backlinks and second is traffic. If your intention is just to get some one way backlinks pointing to your website, you can write article on any keyword related to your website. But if you want backlinks and traffic both then choose your keywords wisely.

Common Mistakes: The most common mistake is writing articles without keeping in mind the goals. Newbie article marketers generally choose broad keywords for writing articles. They get backlinks but not traffic.

Choose long tail keywords for your articles, with low competition, which will rank in the search engines sending good amount of traffic to your website. For an example instead of using “Yoga Mats” use “How to choose best yoga mats” as your keyword. The broad phrase keywords have lot of searches but in turn they also have very stiff competition. So choose your keywords (long tails) wisely to scale your article marketing campaigns.

Using Ezine Articles for scaling your campaigns: Subscribe to the ezinearticles.com newsletter. It sends it on monthly basis about the performance of your articles. It also includes the keywords with which the articles were found. Use those keywords to write more articles and you can bring lot more traffic to your website simultaneously with one way backlinks.

I am a fan of ezinearticles.com because of the linking structure of the article pages. If you view an article on this article directory, just scroll down and you will see a section of related articles. Just imagine on how many pages your article link would be there, giving extra boost to your article rankings, so choose your keywords wisely while submitting to ezinearticles.

Article Directories you must include in your BUM marketing campaigns:

1. Searchwarp.com
2. Ezinearticles.com
3. Articlesbase.com
4. Goarticles.com
5. Amazines.com

For reading more about article marketing, read my previous post here at: Maximizing Benefits of Article Submissions

I hope these tips will improve your article marketing campaigns, if you need any help on this or you haven’t got any point please post in the comment section.

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I got a very informative article about how Google crawl and index pages and how it serves results for a user query. In this article you can get insight of the basics of the mechanism of search engine and can find hints to optimize your WebPages better. Hope you all will find it useful.

When you sit down at your computer and do a Google search, you’re almost instantly presented with a list of results from all over the web. How does Google find web pages matching your query, and determine the order of search results?

In the simplest terms, you could think of searching the web as looking in a very large book with an impressive index telling you exactly where everything is located. When you perform a Google search, our programs check our index to determine the most relevant search results to be returned (”served”) to you.

The three key processes in delivering search results to you are:

Crawling

Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index.

We use a huge set of computers to fetch (or “crawl”) billions of pages on the web. The program that does the fetching is called Googlebot (also known as a robot, bot, or spider). Googlebot uses an algorithmic process: computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site.

Google’s crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs, generated from previous crawl processes, and augmented with Sitemap data provided by webmasters. As Googlebot visits each of these websites it detects links on each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links are noted and used to update the Google index.

Google doesn’t accept payment to crawl a site more frequently, and we keep the search side of our business separate from our revenue-generating AdWords service.

Indexing

Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, we cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.

Serving results

When a user enters a query, our machines search the index for matching pages and return the results we believe are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site’s PageRank. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other practices that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content.

In order for your site to rank well in search results pages, it’s important to make sure that Google can crawl and index your site correctly. Our Webmaster Guidelines outline some best practices that can help you avoid common pitfalls and improve your site’s ranking.

Google’s Related Searches, Spelling Suggestions, and Google Suggest features are designed to help users save time by displaying related terms, common misspellings, and popular queries. Like our google.com search results, the keywords used by these features are automatically generated by our web crawlers and search algorithms. We display these suggestions only when we think they might save the user time. If a site ranks well for a keyword, it’s because we’ve algorithmically determined that its content is more relevant to the user’s query.

You Can Visit Source Here at Google Webmaster Support

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Article marketing commonly known as bum marketing is a very effective and common way for marketing and search engine optimization campaigns. It is a very good tool to bring loads of traffic to your website. Actually the visitors coming on your website after reading your articles are more targeted and more likely in the mood of doing purchase or any other action because your article has already done preselling on your niche topic.

Below are some points applying which you can make your article marketing campaign more effective.

Unique Content: Unique content is the key for a good article. Spun content is of no use, first it will be very hard to be accepted by article directories, second the page views and in turn the click through rate (CTR) will be next to zero. So always use unique content for your articles. Try to keep your article around 300 to 325 words as these articles get high CTR. Articles more than this word limit become boring and the reader loose the interest, second thing internet users do not have patience to read an article of 600 words. So keep it sweet and short.

Catchy Title: Make your title catchy; add some spice to the title of your article. Long title having how to, x ways to, do not, exposed, scam have better click through rate. Treat the title as an ad published in a news paper or magazine. Think yourself “will you read any article having old dull title” the answer is “no”, so try to generate curiosity by your title.

Working on Summary: keep the same points in mind while writing your summary and try to give a glimpse to your readers about the content of the article.

Flow of the article: The flow of the content must be natural. There is an old rule of writing article. In starting of an article “tell them what you are going to tell them”, in body “tell them” and in last paragraph “tell them, what you have told them”. Always keep in mind you are not there just to provide information, instead you are trying to presell them. So give some information in the article and try to generate curiosity, so that they click and visit your website.

Spicing your author’s bio box: The author’s bio box is the most important element from writer’s perspective, because they can put links to their website in it. Use call to action words, try to use “emotional words” which will attract visitors to click and visit your website. Instead of writing “click here to visit weight loss website” write something like “click here to lose weight starting today without the pain of exercising”. Giving emotional touch to the author’s resource box will help you to improve your CTR.

Using ezinearticles.com: This is one of the best article directories over the internet; you can get one way back links to your website. Many webmasters publish your content on their websites from ezine articles, thus giving more links to your website. Along with back links you get a good amount of traffic from this article directory.

Submit your article to ezinearticles.com, once it is published, rewrite it and submit to articlesbase.com and goarticles.com for maximizing results

Hope these points will help you in your article marketing campaign for getting better results.

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This is the third part of the post about important elements of search engine optimization; you can read the first and second post here at: On Page SEO Elements Part 1 and On Page SEO Elements Part 2

Images alt and title tags: Alt tags are used in images, so that in any case, (such as low connection speed or images disabled in browser) if image is not displayed, the user can know about the image. In addition some people turn off JavaScript and images in their browsers, in such cases the alt tag act as an alternative of the image. Also use title tag in images to show about the title of the image. There is one more plus point about using title tags in images, browsers like mozilla firefox does not shows alt tags when you hover mouse over an image, instead it shows title tags.

<img title=”image title here” src=”your-image-location-here (relative or absolute)” alt=”image alt tag here” />

If you want to keep a single image on your webpage, use title and alt tags related to your topic. Suppose you have an article about Dog Training, you can make your title and alt tags as follows:

Alt tag    – (breed of the dog in the picture, ex- Doberman) pic
Title        – Doberman training

Keep it simple and do not try to stuff keywords in these tags.

Using Keyword Synonyms and Related Keywords: Use synonyms and keywords related to your main keywords in your body copy. You can get benefit of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI, more on this topic in coming posts), keep it natural.

Suppose you are writing about “vegetarianism Benefits”, try to use synonyms and related keywords related to this keyword.

Keyword density: In these days keyword density is of less importance. But I my experience for maximum benefit keep it around 3 to 5 %, use your main keyword in the first two or three lines of text, and use it in middle and last of the article. Do not use keywords for the sake of just using it, try to be natural and frame your keyword in the sentence, so that it makes sense

Always follow the rule of thumb. Prepare your content for humans and not for search engine bots. If your visitors will like it, the bots would like it for sure.

Sitemap: Always use sitemaps on your website, preferably two, html and xml versions. HTML version will help your visitors to find out the information they are looking for and the xml version will help the search engine bots to easily find out and crawl your webpages.

Always keep in mind a happy visitor will return to your site frequently (the same applies for bots also) giving you more popularity, which in turn will help you earn more bucks

Privacy Policy, Disclaimer, Contact us: Always keep your privacy policy updated, which type of data you collect from your users, how you use that data, what measures you take to protect the privacy of your visitors, if you collect some type of data whether you share it with third parties or not, all this points should be clearly mentioned. Update your disclaimer about earnings, trademarks, logos or any other information you use. If users find any difficulty using your website or they need more information, there must be a contact us form.

These measures will increase your trust in the eyes of your visitors as well as search engines. It also authenticates your online presence. (I haven’t updated it yet )

HTML validation: Validate your website through http://validator.w3.org/, keep in mind to remove all the errors detected by validator. You may leave warnings. This step will increase your authority and help you to better search engine rankings, especially in Yahoo.

Flow of content: your content must be arranged in a logical manner, so it becomes easy to understand and follow. Use good fonts and colors for background, text and navigation for easy visibility.

Navigation Structure: The website navigation must be easy and logical so that the visitors find it easy to navigate to the information pages. Avoid using links embedded in JavaScript, search engines find it difficult to read the links in JavaScript and if you do not have any other HTML link for the page, it might become an orphan page and its content may never be cached. Many internet users turn off JavaScript in their browsers and will not able to see your links which are made through JavaScript.

One solution of this problem is using <noscript> tag. This will show your links to both the user who turned their JavaScript and search engines.

Internal linking: when linking internal pages, use proper anchor text for the link to the page you are linking. In this way you will help link juice to propagate to your pages which in turn rank them better in the search engines and help them gain page rank

Outbound Links and Using No follow: Keep minimum outgoing links on a page and only link to authority websites which has quality content related to your topic and which would be of interest of your visitors. Keep outbound links on a page, around 40 to 50, maximum. If you are not sure about the content or authority of the website you are linking, always use “nofollow”. This will prevent your link juice to flow out and help you to rank better. Never link to any link farms or website which are involved in selling links and if you have to link them (for whatsoever reason) use “nofollow”. Always be sure that there is no broken link on your webpage.

Use your Keyword in the first link on your page: The first link on your webpage which the search engine bots read is the most important link. By default the anchor text is set to “home” for the first link. Instead of using home as an anchor text, use your main keyword of your website for the first link. (I am not following this point, please don’t ask me why   )

Webpage Weight and loading time: if your webpage is too heavy( the webpage file is large) to load in a moderate time, you may loose most of your visitors, because 99% of the internet users do not have patience to wait more than 10 seconds for a webpage to open. For keeping your webpage weight light keep the size small, avoid using big images, if it is necessary to use big images, slice it in smaller ones. Shockwave (flash content) files make size large, so use it rarely.

Some points might slipped from my mind, if I find any I will post it in coming days, hope you all would have enjoyed this article and got some insights for better on page optimization.

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This is the second part of the post about important elements of search engine optimization; you can read the first post here at: On Page SEO Elements Part 1

Choosing a Domain name: while choosing a domain name try to find out a domain which is simple; preferably with one or two words and have your main keyword in it.

Suppose you keyword is engagement rings, if that is unavailable try with dashes in it like engagement-rings( however domains with dashes have a minus point with it, generally we will talk about type-in visitors or when you become famous, people might type engagementrings without dash in it and in this way you can loose your visitor to your competitor ) if that is also not available use some prefixes( like in this case use best, ideal, genuine, fancy etc) or suffixes ( like store, sale, geographic locations like engagementringsny).

Always try to go for .com, if it is available and if it isn’t then go for .net or .org( please check the guideline for registering a .org domain), or if you want to target your business in a specific geographic location, have domains with geographic TLD, like for Australia .com.au, for United Kingdom .co.uk etc.

The process simplified (Assuming our main keyword as “engagement rings”)

Best Domain Names:

engagementrings.com

engagement-rings.com

If they are not available: Add suffixes and prefixes like

bestenaggementrings.com

fancyengagementings.com

Or

engagementringsstore.com

If these are also not available go for

engagementrings.net

engagement-rings.net

I hope this will make the point clear.

File and Folder Names and Site Structure: Try to name your directories with your keywords or their variations, same with file names. Suppose you have three varieties of engagement rings, white gold, yellow gold and diamond and all of these have three settings namely princess cut, bezel cut and round cut.

Assuming that we have all static pages and we have to create our directory and page structure.

Now what we have

Engagement rings

yellow gold          princess cut

White gold           bezel cut

Diamond               round cut

Scenario : our domain name has keywords in it. Suppose we have domain bestengagementrings.com

Now we can arrange the structure in two ways

First

bestengagementrings.com/yellowgold/princesscut.html
…/bezelcut.html
…/roundcut.html

bestengagementrings.com/whitegold/princesscut.html
…/bezelcut.html
…/roundcut.html

bestengagementrings.com/diamond/princesscut.html
…/bezelcut.html
…/roundcut.html

Second

bestengagementrings.com/princesscut/whitegold.html
…/yellowgold.html
…/diamond.html

bestengagementrings.com/bezelcut/whitegold.html
…/yellowgold.html
…/diamond.html

bestengagementrings.com/roundcut/whitegold.html
…/yellowgold.html
…/diamond.html

Third

Bestengagementrings.com/
Yellowgold-princesscut.html
Yellowgold-whitegold.html
Yellowgold-diamond.html

White-gold-princesscut.html
White-gold-bezelcut.html
White-gold-roundcut.html

Diamond-princesscut.html
Diamond-bezelcut.html
Diamond-roundcut.html

Or just the reverse order (however proximity and order must be kept in mind, more on this in coming posts), but as the number of product increases this structure becomes clumsy and very hard to manage.

Things to keep in mind is, remain near to home page, the more clicks it needs to reach a page from the home page, the less importance it receives, so a page reachable within a click receive more importance in comparison to a page which needs two or more clicks to reach.

Name your directories and pages in lower case and use hyphens if the names become too big and confusing.

Name your images correctly using hyphens, it will also benefit you in search engine image searches and can bring some extra amount of traffic to your website.

Special Formatting Tags: Use special tags like bold, italic, underlined and in different colors for your keywords in the body copy to emphasize importance to your keywords, for making your keyword bold use instead of for giving more value to the keyword.

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