How to Get Free Website Traffic with Article Marketing

Article Marketing is one of the best and free ways to get free traffic to your website on the internet. So what really is article marketing? How can one get free website traffic with article marketing?

Article marketing is simply marketing your products, services or affiliate websites by writing articles about your topic or niche and submitting to an article directory and linking back to your website or affiliate sites.

When people naturally search under the keywords or tags of your article in the search engines, they are directed to your article and the link to your websites or affiliate links. Unlike other internet marketing and advertising platforms such as pay-per-click, article marketing is free. But you need to know the "how to" of it in order get your articles seen on the internet. Otherwise, no-one will find your site naturally.

If your aim is to bring free traffic to your website through articles that will link to your website then the first thing to take note of is to make your article search engine friendly.

Second, submit your article to article directories that have a high page rank (PR) in Google. I am saying Google here because it is the biggest search engine. Otherwise, it can be Yahoo, Bing, MSN, etc.

Check out my hub Top 10 High Page Rank Article Directories.

You are writing your article for a real human being who is searching for that information product to read and take some course of action after reading your article. Research and define your niche. Find that target audience for what you are offering. If you are an affiliate marketer promoting a product, find the target audience or group of people that are looking for that product and get the message across to that group of people in your article. Be specific. It has been proven that narrowing the target audience down to smaller group within a bigger audience group produces good results.

Keywords are very important as they determine whether your article is search engine friendly. Can the search engine spiders crawling thousands of websites pick your article easily and present the result to the searcher on the first page of the search engine? Most searchers do not go beyond the second page of Google (or any search engine). It is therefore important that when writing articles, aim to get the article rank high in the search results.

Before writing your articles, do keyword research and save the results. Researching keyword is to find out if people are searching the internet under that keyword (traffic), find out the competition as to whether people are bidding and advertising under that keyword and what keywords you can optimize to get better results.

Google Keyword Tool

Since Google is by far the biggest search engine, one of the best tool for finding keywords is Google's External Keyword Tool. Type a keyword or keywords into it and you will get many keyword ideas. Download as csv file and save on your computer.

After downloading your keywords, analyse the competition on the keywords you would like to use. To find the competition on a keyword, go to Google and type in the keyword with quotes "...". The number of search results coming up under the exact phrase of that keyword is how much competition you are up against. Aim for keywords that have less than 5000 search results when put into Google search with quotes "...".

For example, I want to write an informative hub about where people can get free domain name appraisal for their domain name. My target audience are beginners in domain name business who want a free service. The keyword phrase I want to use is "domain name appraisal". I type that into Google Keyword tool and it tells me that there are 5,400 searches done on the keyword phrase per month and PPC advertisers are paying as high as 74 cents per click on the keyword. There are 994,000 exactly match phrases in Google. This is too high. If I title my article, domain name appraisal, it may never be found.

I extended the keyword by adding the word "free" in front and "sites" at the end. There are only 279 exact match phrase quoted result on Google for the term "free domain name appraisal sites". So I can now write an article with the keyword - free domain name appraisal sites. Searchers like words like free, best, tips, top 5, etc, so using those will make people find you easily. I did write an article with that extended keyword and with the word "best" further in front. If a searcher types in the phrase 'free domain name appraisal sites' without quotes in Google, he or she will find that article on position no. 7, first page.

Write an article now about the keyword or keyword phrase that you researched and analyzed. Include the keyword within your article headline, name and the actual content of the article. Aim for keyword density of 2-3%.

In an effort to optimize keyword density, authors commit the crime of keyword stuffing. Article directories and even search engines will mark your article as keyword spam article. You may get banned from the article directory or your article may not get published. Observe the rules of each directory and abide by it. Do not go higher than 3% keyword density.

You can write articles 250-550 words. Some article directories specify the minimum number of words. Just write like you talk, keeping your reader audience in mind and the keywords you're targeting.

Simply, the more articles you write, the more free website traffic you get to your website. Set yourself targets on how many articles you would like to write each day. Write many articles around a specific topic or niche and submit them to as many article directories as possible.

Write your articles on notepad or word pad document and copy and paste to article directories with changes every time you want to submit to a new directory. Do not submit duplicate content.

While people are paying for Pay Per Click Advertising, you can easily appear on first page of Google with zero dollars. You can exchange your "time" for free website traffic with article marketing.

After you write your article, submit the article to one of the top article directories.

You might ask, why submitting an article to an article directory or website when I can create my own blog or website? A new website is not "popular" and it may take months or even years for the site to get naturally listed in the search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc). When you submit an article to an article directory such as HubPages, Ezine Articles, Squidoo or GoArticles, your article will live on that domain and inherit the popularity of that website. The search engine spiders will crawl your article more often than a new blog or website that is yet to be indexed in Google.