Link Building – 7 Ways to Use Articles to Build Links
If you want to generate traffic to your website from the search engines you need optimize your web pages and build links to them. The more incoming links you get to those pages the higher your rankings will be. Many site owners fail to put a regular link building plan in place. They may have achieved good rankings initially with a a few incoming links however over time their rankings dropped (and so did their traffic) as competing websites outranked them.
One of the easiest and fastest ways to build links is through writing and publishing articles. The more articles you write and distribute over the Net the more links you’ll acquire.
7 Ways to Use Articles to Build Links
1. Create unique content
Every person has their own unique style of writing that will appeal to a segment of readers. Ezine publishers and site owners are constantly looking for unique content to place in their ezines or on their websites. Submit your content to the top article directories to make it easy for publishers and site owners to find your articles. For example one article could potentially generate 100s of links to your website if it was used in an ezine of 10,000 subscribers or bookmarked by readers using bookmarking sites such as stumbleupon, digg, delicious, etc.
2. Include links in the article resource box
Most article directories allow 2 links in the resource box at the end of the article. One should be anchor text (hyperlinked text), the other your full website address. The anchor text should contain your main keyword as search engines give more weight to links that include keywords related to your site. The full URL should also be included in case someone copies and pastes your article (from the article directory) into their ezine or web page. The anchor text won’t appear but the full URL will remain intact.
3. Practice Internal linking
When publishing the article on your website or blog find related articles or blog posts then link from them to your article using the article title as your anchor text. The best internal links are ones contained within your content.
4. Make it easy for others to link to your article
Encourage your readers to refer your article to others by providing the html code (containing your link text) to place in their web pages. Include bookmarking icons at the end of your article for easy bookmarking.
5. Create an RSS feed
RSS (really simple syndication) allows your readers to be easily notified when a new article is added to your website. If your blog or website was built with WordPress software then it already has RSS feed built into it. Every time you add new content the software automatically alerts the search engines.
6. Optimize your content
Search engines spider and index your content based on keywords. Before writing each article research the keywords people are using to find information on the Web. Make sure these keywords receive a good number of searches each month. Weave these keywords into the title, article body and resource box of each article. This increases the chances of your article receiving good rankings in the search engines.
7. Write guest articles
Blog owners are constantly looking for new content to maintain visitor’s interest. Offer a to be a guest writer for a blog that compliments your own site and receives lots of traffic. This generates powerful incoming links to your own website.
If you implement these link building strategies on a regular basis you’ll see your rankings and traffic steadily increase.