5 Things Every Article Must Have to Increase Traffic and Link Juice
by Tom Duong
Article Marketing Add Comments
Undeniably, article marketing is not only an extremely powerful tool for promoting an online business, but it’s also highly cost effective. Of course, as with so many other things in life, there’s a right way and a wrong way of doing things. When done properly you can achieve almost unlimited success but on the other hand, do it the wrong way and you’ll simply be wasting your time.
So, rather than waste any time, let’s get straight to it…
1. Use a Killer Headline
Contrary to what you may believe, having a killer headline is crucial. For example, let’s say you’re fortunate enough to have as many as 10,000 people scanning the page on which your article link appears. I can assure you, only a small percentage of those people will actually click on your title in order to read the full article. In fact, let’s just say 1% of the people who see your headline end up clicking on it and then reading the full article. Now I’m sure you can see where this is going – 10,000 reading your headline but only 100 people reading your article.
Okay, if we take into consideration what’s been mentioned above, what would you suppose we should be focusing on more – headline or article?
2. Keyword Targeting
Let’s face it, SEO rankings aren’t just going to happen. In fact, the only way you’ll get them is if you’re absolutely serious with regards to the use of keywords. The bottom line is, the vast majority of Internet marketers are willing to use practically any keywords, or they simply choose to use the most commonly used keywords relating to the product of service they’re promoting. Of course, the more common your keywords are, the harder it is to get decent SEO rankings. Instead, you should be aiming to use the less common keywords which relate to your product in order to have a higher ranking. You can be rest assured that if you write a killer headline, and you follow the other advice being offered in this article, then hitting page one on the search engine results pages (SERPs) should certainly be within your reach.
If for example you’re promoting wind or solar power systems which one can build yourself, then instead of using keywords such as “wind power” or “solar power”, you should rather use ones such as “DIY Wind Generators”.
I assure you, it’s been proven time and time again that this strategy pays off. Finally, once you’re satisfied that you’ve got all your long-tail keywords covered, you need to move on to the next level, eventually ending off with your primary keyword.
3. Quality Content
Let’s face it, it’s incredibly frustrating when you’re desperately searching for specific information on the Internet, and you come across a headline that suggests you’ve just found what you’re looking for, only to then discover that the article has no useful information. The sad truth is, with webmasters being increasingly desperate for traffic, many are outsourcing their article writing to people who simply couldn’t care less about quality content. Of course not everyone is able to write quality articles and as such, there’s nothing wrong with outsourcing but the problem is, good ghost writers can be hard to come by. The fact of the matter is; if you want your articles to generate traffic to your site, then it’s imperative that they provide readers with something of value.
4. Simple Format
While this may seem obvious to some, particularly to content writers, articles need to be presented in a simple format. In other words, rather that single 1000 word blocks of text, break it up into numerous short paragraphs. Remember, people want to be able to quickly scan your article before they actually read it. After all, they need to know if it’s what they’re looking for.
5. Link, Links and More Links
I know, creating backlinks to your articles may well not be your favorite activity but the fact is, it’s absolutely vital. Remember, you need to ensure that the search engines are looking for your articles and then ranking them. While rankings are largely influenced by the popularity of the sites which link to your articles, if you’re aiming for SEO traffic, you’ll need to promote your articles on an ongoing basis.
Okay, one last thing before I finish up with this. Each and every article you write should be worth writing in the first place. Unlike in the past, if you want to achieve real success nowadays with article marketing, you simply cannot churn out a hundred articles each week without doing adequate research. Instead, you need to focus on one article at a time, and you need to promote it for all you’re worth before you move on the next one.
Got any article marketing tips you’d like to add? Feel free to post them here in the comments below.
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I am surprised by how many people want to promote their website but do not use article marketing. There are many sites that are eager to put up your articles taken from article directories with a link back to your site.
I concur. There are many website owners who don’t know about article marketing and the many benefits it has when it comes to generating massive traffic.
Content is key, as they say! No one would want to read poorly written and useless articles. So it’s really important that when one writes something, it has some valuable and relevant content, something that the readers will be able to relate to. Thanks!
I also like article marketing, however the only problem I have found is that the more popular ones keep your articles for a few days before they are put live.
The article sites that accept articles immediately always seem to be very low quality sites.
You’re absolutely right! The top performing article directories like EzineArticles, GoArticles, and ArticleAlley take longer to approve your articles in order to weed out all the bad articles.
The low quality article directories accepts almost every mediocre article you submit to them, from the non-unique to the non-edited version of PLR articles.
As an article directory owner, I like to have article that have words more than 300. I got so many short articles and that doesn’t look like quality articles. Maybe in the future I will increase the limit words to 500.
The best quality article mostly between 500 to 1000 words.
One more thing I have to tell. I have seen many article have broken link. Too bad.
Since you’re an article directory owner, I can see why it’s important to maintain quality articles on your directory. This is done to ensure that publishers can find great content to publish on their own website. In turn, you get more traffic if the publishers keep coming back to your directory.
However, as an article/affiliate marketer, it is much more effective to write shorter articles (300 to 500 words) because they want to give the reader just enough information so that they will click on the link in the resource box to get more information.
Once the reader clicks on that link, they are immediately sent to the affiliate marketer’s landing page.
Hey Tom, For my book blogs, which was the original reason I started my blog a few years ago, I used a format (Author Name: “Book Title”). For sake of consistency, I have stuck with it, and esp. b/c changing titles on previous articles will result in broken links etc. Do you think consistency is over-rated in this case? Thanks!
I don’t think consistency is over-rated. I think it is generally better to stay consistent when it comes to writing your articles. And yes, you do not want to change your previous article titles as it will break your incoming links.
If you really don’t like the format of your current titles, I’d say start a new format, but stick with your new format and stay consistent. Sooner or later, your loyal readers will adapt to the new changes.
I think writing quality articles is not all that matters. It is only half of what you have to do to succeed in article marketing. Your resource box should include a call to action which will make the reader likely to click on it. Something like “get the best laptop at the cheapest price by clicking here” will be great to convince the reader backed up with your quality article.