Most online businesses do not succeed without traffic but if you are a small business, either online or offline, you may not be able to afford a lot of money for advertising. One cheap, proven way that keeps bringing you visitors to your site over the long term is article marketing. Articles about your business with value information in them are posted to sites like ezinearticle.com or Buzzle and the link to your website is pasted below.
Most articles contain keywords and keyword phrases that people commonly use to search for whatever it is you are selling. Search engine robots from Google, Yahoo and other search engines will lead people looking for what you have to offer if your articles contain these keywords.
The recommended method of writing these articles is to do some research and find out what keywords work best for your topic area and then sprinkle them through your article. Some people repeat the words three to five times throughout and entire article and other people cram as many as twenty different keywords in one article in order to snag the attention of the search engines. The problem with the latter method is that it often results in an article that is almost unreadable so it is important to keep them a bit sparse. It is also not a good idea to cram too many keywords in one article because Google search bots will then mark your article as spam. If this happens then your article will not be listed in the search engines.
Google lists articles that are in agreement with their Latent Semantic Indexing program, which in essence prevents people from cheating when they use keywords. The keywords and keywords phrases you use have to be related to each other. For instance if you are doing an article about Apple Computers, the name Steve Jobs should be in there somewhere. So in essence, this means using both keywords and the phrases that go with them so that Google does not think your articles are worthless in terms of information.
So even though you are creating these articles to please the search engines you should also create them with the idea of providing interesting information to your readers. That is why experience article writers always recommend you write an article that absolutely knocks the socks of your readers and that, if at all possible, also includes the number one keyword phrase or single word right inside the title of the article. For instance, article leading to selling paintball gear, should have the word paintball gear in the title as in “Paintball Gear That Gets You Kicked Off of the Field!” This helps your paintball players find you so you can sell them online paintball related products.
