SEO Expert

Posts Tagged ‘seo’

Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing your website in a way that it ranks in a high place for your designated keyword. It’s actually quite easy to do. The process exist from two important points: Internal factors and external factors. Internal factors is everything which happens on your website. External is everything that happens outside of your website.

The first thing which is important for an optimized website is content. Content is always king. You will never rank high for any keyword if you are not offering fresh and original content. When writing always try to keep the word count above five hundred words. This might seem like an easy target, but when actually writing you’ll soon get stuck at some point that you just can’t write any further. When writing this text, try to put the most important keyword of your website in it a few times. This is the word which you want to rank high for. Do not spam your keywords all over the content. This will not work in your advantage, but in your disadvantage. As with everything; don’t overdo it. Google will penalize you for it which will even take you down in the search results. Stacking keywords used to be a good strategy for ranking high, but Google smartened up and created a mysterious algorithm which determines how high your website should rank. Anything which will seem unnatural to it will receive a penalty. If you aren’t gifted with extreme writing talent you can even buy a few articles to offer your readers some original content.

Content might be one of the most important things when optimizing your website, there are other factors which are important as well. Always fill in a good three to five word description in the title tag. This tag is shown in the search results. Putting important keywords in this title is a must! As mentioned before, don’t overdo it. Three to five words is more than enough to give a good description of your website. There are two other tags which aren’t as important as they used to be, but it can’t hurt to add them. These tags are called they keywords and description tag. In the keyword tag you can put up to twenty (don’t overdo it!) keywords which might be important for your website. In the description you create a short description of the designated page of about 160 characters. This description will also show up in the search results, so it might be wise to give a fitting description which corresponds to the title tag.

Another factor which is extremely important are styling options. Text which is displayed bigger with an h1 tag is valued higher then plain text. Always make your content fluent by creating headers and titles with the h1, h2 and h3 tags. Even text which is displayed bold or inverted is more important then plain text.

Avoid technical stuff and stick to plain HTML if possible. The Google spider can’t read the fancy Flash and Javascript you put on your website. Especially if you use Flash or Javascript for your menu, ditch it as soon as possible. The Google spider can’t follow the links in your menu and your pages aren’t indexed.

Use breadcrumbs when creating your website. It creates a better structure in your links, but it’s also user friendly. Visitors can see where they are and where they came from.

All the above factors are on page and actually rather easy to do. The external factor is a lot more difficult to do because you need some help of other websites. You need so called ‘back links’, links from other websites referring to your website. One link from a website will count as a ‘vote’ and will give your page a certain rank; pagerank. Pagerank is nothing more than a rank from one to ten which gives some insight on how many back links you have. There are a few ways of gaining back links. The easiest way is to create solid content which people want to link to. Once again this proves that content is king! The better your content, the more people will link to you. For a blog about technology, or a specific niche this is rather easy to do. For a web shop it is really hard to get back links. The only websites linking to you are most likely link portals which have little to no value at all. Another way to collect back links is commenting on other people their blogs. You will most likely have the option to leave your link. This will drive some traffic to your website, but also counts as a back link which is what you were after for in the first place.

Search engine optimization isn’t as hard as all the ‘experts’ make it look like. You can easily do it yourself. There are thousands of tips and tricks out there for optimizing your website. Even ways which are illegal according to Google. Whichever way you use to optimize your website, content is ALWAYS king.

About the Author:

Mr. Carr is an active consultant/web developer, and is responsible for day-to-day operations within the firm. Mr. Carr is extremely passionate about technology in general and has developed websites and online companies for over 14 years. Prior to founding CMA, he launched and subsequently sold LandTek Holdings which was a successful online media and training company. See his latest site at http://www.justclickauctions.com/ which has website auctions to buy and sell websites.

There are some who regard natural search engine optimisation as part luck and part genius. The reality is that it takes its name from a word that people associate with natural, which can mean pure and happening as intended. If you keep in mind the root word nature and the meanings associated with the word natural, you are set to gain a good understanding of the basics of this form of search engine optimisation (SEO) that has become a very important marketing factor for any and very website.

Now that you understand the concept by definition, let’s take a look at what that definitional means. The size of your business has minimal, if any bearing, because the bottom line is that you need to establish and maintain a presence in the natural search engine rankings of the top search engines and this can be accomplished by using scalable natural search engine optimisation solutions such as keywords, internal linking, competitive analysis and content analysis. These are natural solutions that must be managed by an individual or team of experts, depending on the size of your website.

More specifically, when it comes to keywords, you must pick the proper phrases for your website to ensure that these words place you at the top of the search engines. This includes proper keyword density, which means you cannot overload your pages with certain words in the hopes that they will get targeted higher in the search engines. You must use these keywords properly in your content, Meta tags and other applicable areas.

Internal link building is regarded as one of the more challenging facets of SEO. Many people consider it problematic because it directly impacts the power of your website to be found in the searches. Building internal and external links is a critical ingredient for the recipe of a properly optimized website so you must have access to the ability to build links that are strong and purposeful.

Equally as important is your content when it comes to natural search engine optimisation, where content is recognized by many as king. Starting with content volume which is a part of optimizing your web pages and including content analysis which is an introspective look at not only what the content of your web pages say but the ability of that content to achieve one of the major goals of your website: to attract traffic that comes to your pages and purchases your goods or services.

With all this focus on building keywords, structuring content and properly labeling Meta tags, it is important to make sure that established websites receive regular reviews to track the results of your SEO workings. Whether you’ve done the work in house or sourced it out to the professionals, you need to know what results your SEO is achieving for you. This is accomplished by tracking the results of your traffic, rankings and conversations. There are far too many different types of reports to narrow it down to just one or two but a part of staying on top of your game is to understand that the power of the search engine is constantly changing. This means you must adapt and change your website to meet the search engine criteria.

When you have addressed these basic areas, another basic consideration is your website’s reputation. As a rule, you want your website to express a positive image of you and your company. This can be accomplished with proper management of your SEO reputation. Take care to reduce negative PR and enable searchers to find content they are looking for by increasing your rankings with positive experiences with customers and the right natural search engine optimisation focus.

Building and promoting a new website isn’t easy. The first thing you need to know, is to learn how to drive organic search traffic using SEO.

SEO is short for search engine optimization. It is a process that combines off-site and on-site optimization to allow you to get higher search engine rankings.

In the search engine world, if you don’t rank on the first page of the search results, your site doesn’t exist. Visitors must be able to see your URL in the search results when they want to search for relevant information. So how do you ensure your site gets ranked at the top?

It will take a whole book to explain the entire SEO process properly. But for the sake of discussion, we will just list the most important component – which is off-site optimization. Off-site SEO sounds like a complex hi-tech phrase, but it’s actually very easy to implement. It involves building back links with relevant anchor texts.

Assuming that you have already done your keyword research, you would know what keywords to go for. For instance, if you are trying to rank for the phrase “seo guide”, then your links must contain the words “seo guide”. Don’t try to use phrases like “click here”, or “visit website”.

Problem is, since these links are posted in external sites, how do you ensure that the proper anchor texts are used?

One way you can do so is to use a blog posting service. A blog posting service allows you to pick your desired anchor texts. Here is how it works.

Step 1: Choose a high quality blog network. Sometimes, services that promise thousands of blog posts may be lacking in quality. After all, who is going to promote the thousands of blogs? Go for quality, then quantity.

Step 2: Once you sign up with the service, you will then post your blog entry. Most services require your article length to be at least 300 words. Just write naturally, and you will be able to generate that article length easily. Also, keep in mind that there is no need to resort to keyword stuffing. Write as if you are writing for a human reader.

Step 3: Make sure you insert your links properly with your desired anchor texts. Note that the service provider will not format the links for you. So you must remember to format all links properly with HTML tags. Most services will allow you to include between two to three links.

Step 4: Your article will then be approved for distribution. There is nothing more to do on your part. Just sit back and wait for the blog posting report to arrive. The report should contain the links to your blog posts, so you know where you links are.

Give the articles a few weeks to be indexed by the search engines. Once the articles start to age in the search engines, they will become more valuable. In a few months time, you will be able to see a boost in search engine rankings. For older sites, sometimes all it takes is a few short weeks.

ou can find lots of information about SEO on the Internet. A lot of it is theory based. That means the information has not been tested in a real world situation. Here are some SEO techniques that have been proven to work.

1) Primary keywords in page title.

This is an easy technique that everyone can implement. Always include your target keyword phrases in your article title. That will help boost your search rankings. Don’t just use your company name or domain as the page title. If you really wish to include your company name, place it after the primary keyword phrase.

2) Use of unique Meta tags.

Although Meta tags are invisible to the visitor, search engines still rely on the information to rank web pages. Try not to use the same Meta tags for all the pages. The two most important Meta tags are the “keywords” and “description” tags. Use unique tags for each web page.

3) No duplicate content within the same website.

The search engines are coming down hard on websites with duplicate content within the same domain. Websites may be banned or penalized. If you have websites that require duplicate content (e.g. print friendly pages), always use canonical urls to specify the primary web page.

4) Back links!

Don’t forget to acquire as many relevant back links as you can for your website! Many webmasters tend to spend too much time generating content, and they forget to acquire back links. More traffic doesn’t guarantee more traffic. But more back links will get you more traffic for sure!

There are more that you can do. But the above techniques represent the bare minimum. In other words, you must implement these techniques for your site to rank well in the search engines. Here is how you can practice and improve your SEO skills.

1) SEO contests.

This is the number method for perfecting your SEO skills link in the current promo junkie contest: Oes Tsetnoc . In order to find out how good you are at SEO, you must pit your skills against other webmasters. Usually, those who compete are new to SEO, so the competition is fair. Besides, everyone can share their experiences and learn from one another. It’s a great way to put SEO into practice.

You can find out more about SEO contests from blogs, forums, and other webmaster communities. Word travels fast on the Internet. If you are well connected, you will hear about them sooner or later. The best part is, while practising, you stand a chance to win great prizes! For every contest, a few generous sponsors tend to sponsor prizes such as cash, gift vouchers, digital products, etc.

2) Webmaster forums.

SEO contests can take a month or two to complete. If you don’t wish to participate in such contests, you can join webmaster or internet marketing forums to learn more about SEO. Many members are more than happy to share real life experiences with the rest of the community. If you have questions, just ask. You will be surprised at the number of members who are happy to provide you with great answers. In time to come, you will become an SEO expert. Now it’s time for you to share what you have learned with the community.

To get good rankings in the search engines, you need back links. You don’t just want any back link, you want back links from well established websites. There are many ways you can build links to your website.

One of the most effective ways is to build links in the blogosphere. The blogging space has got thousands and thousands of blogs. Some of them have been around for years.

A year ago, we released a blog posting service for our clients. It started with just 1 network, and has expanded to include 6 live networks. Each network targets a different niche. This is to ensure that all clients get their links on targeted blogs. For example, if you are trying to promote a weight loss product, you can post links in the Food, Medication and Health network.

These networks consist of premium blogs only. The themes are all search engine optimized to ensure that clients get the most benefits by posting in these blogs.

Each article should contain at least 300 words, and not more than 2 active links. The articles will be posted simultaneously to all the blogs in the network.

To start building links, write an article that’s relevant to the website that you are promoting. Purchase at least one credit on the blog posting service website. You can use the credit for any network.

In the article, embed your links with HTML link code. Submit your article from your dashboard, and the article will be approved within 48 hours. Once approved, the article will be posted to all the blogs within the network. This is a great way to build high quality back links. As the blog ages, the value of the back links also increases.

Choose your anchor texts wisely. If possible, target long tail keywords with low competition first. Once your site becomes an authority site, you can try targeting more competitive keyword phrases.

FastSubmitArticles.com is announcing the release of Premium Article Submission packages for individuals, small business owners, and corporate organizations. The service will help individuals and businesses to achieve higher rankings in the search engines. Companies who use the service will also receive traffic through the articles that they distribute.

In the beginning, FastSubmitArticles.com started out by offering article distribution services at an affordable rate of $6. For this fee, the Company distribute an article to over 300 well established article directories on the Internet. By utilizing the article distribution service, business owners can expect to receive traffic from links that are included in each article. For every article submitted, the author is allowed to include 2 to 3 links. When a visitor reads the article and find the content interesting, he can click on the links to find out more about the Company promoted in the author resource box.

In addition, the links will also help boost search engine rankings. Each link points to the official source of information. The search engines see this as some kind of “vote” for the official site, and learns to recognize the site as an authority site. This leads to higher rankings in the search results.

Many business owners welcome the new service because writing and submitting articles can be a very time consuming process. To write an article of professional quality will take an average of 15 minutes. The submission process takes even more time, depending on the total number of article directories involved. Due to the time consuming nature of article marketing, many business owners have decided to stay away from this traffic generation method.

With the release of the article distribution service, businesses can now outsource all their article marketing activities. With an additional $10, FastSubmitArticles.com will provide an article for the client. The client has the option to vet through, make an necessary edits, and approve the article before distribution commences. The turnaround time for distributing an article is about 3 to 4 business days.

Seeing the initial success of the service, many clients started to request for manual submission to several high page rank websites. To cater to this need, FastSubmitArticles.com has recently decide to release Premium Distribution Packages. All submissions done for premium sites are manual. If for some reason an article is rejected, FastSubmitArticles.com will work with the site editor to get the article approved.

However, problems are extremely rare. There are over 20 Premium sites (all with high page rank) included in the package. Due to the high quality content that is submitted on a daily basis, many of these Premium sites have granted FastSubmitArticles.com expert author status, which means that articles are approved instantly upon submission.

Darren Chow, the founder of the article distribution service, commented, “Since launching the premium packages, 80% of our clients are signing up for premium submissions. Although the normal distributions are much cheaper, most still see value in our Premium packages. Many business owners have seen a boost to their search engine rankings after signing up for Premium submissions.”

He then adds, “Article marketing has been a proven traffic generation method. Many marketers have achieved great success with it, and there is no reason why it wouldn’t continue to work well for others.”

To date, the Company has distributed thousands of articles on behalf of their clients. Their portfolio of clients include many successful Internet Marketers as well as well known organizations.

Ok, the post title seems a little over the board. But it says exactly what I intend to convey in this post – to show you exactly how search engine optimization works without all the frills. With a stripped down case study, you can see how article distributions can benefit your site. It doesn’t have to take long for you to get traffic. Let’s take a look at the website that we are going to examine.

If you have been with us since last year, you would have heard of the new service that I released – the Blog Content Syndication service. This service allows you to post spinnable articles to laser targeted blogs. The keyword that I was going to target was “Blog content syndication“, which describes what the site is about.

Make a search in Google for this keyword phrase: Google search – blog content syndication

You will see a result like this:

My website is ranked in the top spot for my choice of keywords. Further down, in the 5th position, you see an article in Ezinearticles that was published by me. Questions must be swimming through your head now.

Q: What link building methods did you use?

Q: Are you receiving traffic from the search engines?

Q: How long does it take to get there?

Q: What exactly did you do to get to the top spot?

I’ll give you all the answers here. Let’s try to answer one question at a time.

Q: What link building methods did you use?
I only use article marketing to build links to the site. I want this to be a case study, so I didn’t use any other link building method.

Q: Are you receiving traffic from the search engines?

Yes, I’m receiving traffic for these keywords:

* blog syndication

* blog content syndication

* content syndication

* syndicate blog content

* syndicate pricing

* …and a few other keywords.

That is why I say, never discount long tail keywords. These keywords bring me an average of 15 unique visitors a month. That works out to be about  450 visitors each and every month. Big deal you say? It may be a big deal, or it may mean nothing at all. It all depends on how you look at the numbers.

Here is what your mindset should be like.

Try to see each and every click as a human being sitting at the computer. What is he trying to do? Is he trying to search for information? Is he trying to look for some specific products and services? The keywords that bring you the traffic will reveal a lot about the intent behind the search.  That is why long tail is still valuable. How do you guess the intent behind a keyword such as “exercise equipment”? The visitor could be searching for information, or he could be looking to buy. It’s harder to tell. But if you get traffic from keyword phrases such as “exercise equipment wholesale”, it’s easier to guess the intent isn’t it?

In general, you will get more traffic from 2 keyword phrases. But you get more targeted traffic from 3 or 4 keyword phrases. Even with just a trickle of traffic from these keyword phrases, you can still make money. How? By matching the right offer to the right prospect. In other words, you have a much higher chance of converting a visitor that came from a long tail search into a buying customer.

Here is where lots of exciting things can happen.

That first time buyer has the potential to become a repeat buyer. The question is, what do you have to offer your newly acquired customer? The buyer may come to website to buy an ebook about weight training. As the business owner, you should take the time to understand more about the goals of your customers. What is he trying to achieve? Is he trying to lose weight? Or is he trying to build ripping muscles? Once you understand where your customer is going, it’s easy to find the right offers to offer your customers. You can try offering a weight loss diet plan, health supplements, coaching programs, etc. One single visitor, with the potential of spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars with you.

I don’t know about you but to me, it sounds logical (and exciting as well) to pursue targeted keyword searches. You probably won’t get to see thousands of visitors daily, but you are still making sales. This is the reason why you don’t need a lot of traffic to succeed online. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t continue building traffic. When you start seeing results, and conversions are good, find ways and means to scale up your traffic.

For every traffic source that you test, always maintain the same mindset. It’s a human being at the other end, trying to search for something. Do you have what it is that the visitor is searching for? Will he pay money for what you have? If you have done your market research, you already know the answers to these questions.

Q: How long does it take to get there?

About 4 weeks. The lesson here is this: Submit highly targeted and relevant information and you have a much higher chance of ranking quickly, and higher in the search results. Understand that the primary purpose of the search engines is to deliver highly relevant content. If you have more relevant information, products, or services than what is currently available in the search results, you have a very good chance of doing well in the serps.

From the example that I’ve given, it took just 4 weeks to rank in the top spot in Google, out of over 21 million results. And you will be surprised at the effort that I put in to achieve that ranking…which leads me to the next question.

Q: What exactly did you do to get to the top spot?

Let me break this down into a step by step guide for you. You may want to print this out or save this somewhere, just in case you need to refer to it later on.

Step 1: Choose a domain name with my target keyword phrase in it.

Step 2: Include keyword phrase in article title, and meta tags.

Step 3: I wrote 3 articles and submit them to Ezinearticles.

Step 4: I combined 2 of the articles into one 450 word article, and submitted the article using Premium Distribution. The reason why I used premium distribution is because there are more high page rank sites (20+) in the package, which will help boost the search rankings. Note that I did just ONE premium distribution.

Step 5: I wait 4 weeks for the articles to be indexed, and I checked the search results every week or so. In the first week, the site is indexed. In the second week, it rose to page one. In the third week, it rose to second in ranking. By the forth week, it has risen to ranking number 1.

Mission accomplished.

It looks simple, and it sounds too simple to be true. But SEO is that simple! I use this as a stripped down case study so that you can see for yourself, beyond a shadow of a doubt that article marketing really works! But everyday, I still see people posting comments in the forums about not ranking well in the search engines. If they can’t rank in the serps, they are doing it wrong.

Here are some of the main reasons why some sites fail to rank:

* Poor quality content.

The search engine is all about relevancy. It has to be able to determine the context (meaning) of the web page. How do you expect the search bot to do this if the web page is littered with nothing but broken English? The bot is dumb. It is programmed to work in a certain way, and it will behave predictably. In this case, it will dumb the poorly written web page.

* Choosing the wrong keywords to target.

Some keywords are easy to rank. Some are harder to rank. And some are impossible to rank. You need to be able to tell which keywords will or will not rank. You can do this just by looking at the search results. Pick any keyword you want, and make a search in Google. Then let Google tell you whether your keywords are likely to rank or not. Here are the possible scenarios.

a) Easy to rank.

You find web pages that are hardly relevant to your search phrase. This means that there is little or no relevant  content in the database. All you need to do, is to provide better, and more relevant information, and the search engines will lap it up – guaranteed.

b) Harder to rank, but not impossible.

You find lots of competition for the keywords that you are trying to target. For example, you see domain names with the keyword phrase in them. These are probably sites owned by webmasters who know all about SEO. The only way to beat them, is to build more quality inbound links. That means you need more time, effort, and perhaps money to compete in this niche. But don’t be put off just because you see lots of competition. Usually, competition is a good thing – it shows that there is money to be made in the niche. That’s why online marketers are using SEO to drive traffic. If you have a viable business, go full steam ahead and dominate the keywords.

c) Impossible to rank.

These are niches that you are better off steering clear of. They could be insurance industry, banking industry, legal sites, government sites, etc. These keywords are dominated by the big players in town, and they are the authority websites. You can try competing in the same space if you are a legitimate financial institution, bank, school, etc. But if you are just trying to sell some ebooks, use Adsense, or make some dough using CPA, you are likely to reap nothing.

* Not enough inbound links.

These are marketers who distribute just 1 article, sit back, and do nothing. And when they don’t see results, they claim that article marketing doesn’t work. You are likely to face competition with the keywords that you are trying to target. At the end of the day, your SEO efforts will come down to the number of inbound links with your target keywords as the anchor texts. Keep building links! Try to get as many inbound links as you can with your keywords in them.

Whether you rank well or not depends on just 2 things:

1) The number of links with relevant anchor texts.

2) Link juice from high quality websites – i.e. websites with high page rank.

Page rank is just Google’s way to let the world know whether the site is an authoritative site or not. But don’t discount sites with page rank zero. This is because a site may be waiting for the page rank to be updated, or the page rank indicator has been removed. Google remove page rank when it suspects the sites are trying to sell links. But these sites still rank very well in the search results. A page rank zero inbound link with relevant anchor texts is still better than having no links.

But in this case study, since I enjoy the benefits of so many high page rank websites like Ezinearticles, Squidoo, Artipot, Americanchronicle, etc…I just used a Premium distribution, and I got the first position. Whenever possible, try to get high page rank sites to link to you.

I’m working on a new Press Release service that you will you to post news on high page rank sites like EINNews, CNet, Denver Post, Daily Herald, and more…many of these sites have at least page rank 4. Some have page rank 5, or 6. The goal here is to get as many high page rank sites from different regions to link back to your site.

In fact, I’ve already completed the design of the site (check out the sleek dashboard). I’m just working on a few details right now, and the service will be released either before the end of the week, or the start of next week.

So what about the Blog Content Syndication service?

No worries. I’m still working hard on promoting the blogs. Link building has already began for all 30 blogs. Let the links age. And yes, I’m still taking orders if you are interested. Send me an email to see if we can work something out. The next 2 networks to be published are:

* Home improvement network

* Health network

Besides link building, I’m also posting additional content to the blogs (like this post you are reading now) so that the blogs appear more natural.

In the meantime, look out for an email from me with regards to the launch of the press release distribution service.

Hope you have enjoyed this post.

Take care, and have a nice week ahead.

Don’t forget to email me if you have any questions about anything (don’t have to be about business).

Darren Chow

[flickr]tag:writing,articles,web browser(,3)[/flickr]

As the owner of a professional article distribution service (I do this everyday), I have the benefit of reviewing and submitting hundreds of articles each month.

As you probably already know, article submission is just one way to build links online. The major problem with article marketing is that it can be rather painful. Consider people who don’t write well, type slowly, or don’t know how to use software to help automate the submission process. Writing and submitting one article can take hours!

On top of that, if you don’t follow the rules, your articles may get rejected, and you’re just wasting time, writing and submitting your articles.

Here are some general guidelines. If you follow these guidelines, you will yield the best results.

WHAT NOT TO DO

* Submit articles with less than 450 words.

Most article directories accept articles with at least 450 words. Some may accept more, some less. But most will accept 450 words.

* Promote a site with nudity of excessive affiliate links.

It’s not common for article directories to reject a site that has been completed. But if you are trying to promote an adult site, or if your site contains nothing but affiliate links, your articles have a chance of being rejected.

* Use super long anchor keyword phrases.

Keep your anchor texts to 3 words max. Don’t link the entire sentence. Keep the links to your author resource box. The author resource box should not be more than 450 characters. 450 characters will allow you to write about 2 to 3 sentences. There is no need to write a short story here. Just a couple of sentences with static text links in them will do.

* Use profanity in your articles.

Don’t use any kind of profanity in your articles. Vulgar words and phrases are automatically detected by some article directories. Your articles will be rejected before they have a chance to be reviewed by a human editor.

* Submit an illegible article.

Articles are seldom disapproved because of grammatical errors, spelling errors, or sentence structure faults. But it has to be of decent quailty. In other words, readers must understand what you are trying to say. If English is not your native language, consider hiring someone to write for you.

* Use software to spin articles.

Some article marketers use software to spin PLR (Private Label Rights) articles, in the hope that the article directories won’t detect the duplicate content. Unfortunately, most software just replace words with synonyms. In the process, the meaning is skewed and the article no longer make sense. For instance, the word “market” may mean several different things depending on context.

Consider:

Original sentence: I go to the stock market to invest.

After replacement: I go to the stock bazaar to invest.

OR: I go to the stock shop to invest.

The word “market” may mean “bazaar” or “shop” – a place for buying stuff. But when you put the words into context, notice that the same sentence now sounds funny.

* Use URL as your links.

You shouldn’t be using URLs as your links. The bulk of your traffic will be coming from the search engines. So make sure you spend a little time working on your keyword research, and pick some phrases to target. Use those keywords in your links.

* Write and submit an entire report.

You are submitting articles, not reports. Every now and then, I see writers submitting articles with over a thousand words. If you have long articles, break them up into separate articles. You are not posting to your blog. You are building links with your articles. More articles equal more links.

In addition, most readers just scan articles instead of read the entire page. If you write super duper long articles, you may lose your reader, and you never get the chance to see them again.

WHAT TO DO

* Write and submit articles regularly.

If you are not building links, your competitor may just be creeping up on you. So make it a habit to distribute articles regularly – even if it’s just one article per week.

* Submit to hundreds of article directories.

Don’t just submit to 1 or 2 article directories. Start with Ezinearticles.com. Once approved, you can use the same articles to distribute to all the article directories.

* Outsource of use software to help you distribute articles.

It doesn’t make sense to sit at the computer for hours just to distribute articles. You have better things to do. Outsource all the article submissions or use some software to automate the process. Your article marketing will become way less painful.

A word of caution if you are hiring writers to write for you. Use a duplicate content check tool like CopyScape to check for plagarism before paying your writers. Some writers are just out to scam others – they scrape content off other websites and submit them as their own. Don’t be fooled!

* Focus on keywords.

Try to dilute your efforts by targeting too many keywords at any one time. Focus on two or three keywords, and write your articles based on those keywords. Once they start to rank in the search engines, move on to other keywords.

Notice that there is a cumulative effect. The more keywords you target, the more traffic you will get. But be patient. SEO does take a little bit of time, especially for competitive keywords.

* Publish 100% original articles.

Using PLR articles is fine. But many directories (like Ezinearticles) will not accept PLR articles. You have to be prepared to accept that if you are using PLR articles. Otherwise, you just have to write 100% orginal and unique articles. Unique means that your articles must not be published on the Internet before. So don’t make the mistake of posting to your blog, and then submit the articles. Once the articles get indexed by the search engines, Ezinearticles may not approve the articles.

* Be clear about your goals.

What are you trying to achieve? If you just want to build links, you can submit general information articles. If you are trying to sell something, focus on the products and talk more about the problems that your products will help to solve. Don’t give away all the answers in your articles. In that 450 words, show that you understand the customers, and that you are sincere in helping them overcome whatever obstacles they are facing. That will encourage them to click your links and visit your site.