Collective Clicks Internet Marketing Blog

Article marketing involves posting keyword-focused articles on article distribution sites that then submit your content throughout their network. The reason this is an important website promotion technique is because some of these article sites have a significant readership following.

Most article submission sites allow you to post your content for free, however some of the paid ones can be more effective. Once published, your content becomes available for all to see, and ideally reuse. When done properly, articles you post on article sites can then become “link bait” for other sites. For example, let’s say you own a business that sells watches. If you or your web content writer write an article about purchasing a nice watch, others who may want to post a blog entry about watches may link to your article, getting increased exposure for your writing and your subject matter, especially if the article site gets a great deal more traffic than your own website, which is common.

Many article sites will allow you to include HTML links in your articles. You can then link your keyword phrase to the page on your website you’re trying to promote for that keyword. This is a highly effective search engine optimization technique so make sure you do adequate keyword research before you begin writing. Others won’t allow you to do that, but they’ll have no problem with you including links in your resource box (your profile or signature information used to let people know who you are), which adds important one-way backlinks to your website.

Even if you have to pay to have articles written for you, it’s fairly inexpensive to have a good article written by a knowledgeable writer. There are many freelance sites on the web that can help you find a writer for a low price. Therefore, article marketing can be a very cost effective means of website promotion for your home business.

Technorati Tags: Article Marketing, collective clicks, content marketing, increase traffic, search engine optimization, SEO

If you ask most SEO experts what the most difficult part of their internet marketing campaign is, most will tell you that it is link building. Link building is certainly not as easy as starting up a blog, conducting keyword research, optimizing pages on your site for search engines, setting up PPC campaigns, using social media sites, etc because all of these methods can be controlled. Other sites ultimately control what content goes on their sites and they have full control of whether they want to link to your site or not.

However, link building is certainly not impossible and if you put in the time and effort you can build high quality links over time. By high quality links, I mean links from reputable sites that contain your targeted keywords as the anchor text.

You can start by submitting your site to link directories which contain hundreds, if not thousands, of outbound links to sites from all industries. While these are back links that will be seen by search engines, they are not high quality links that will get you a first page ranking. One way to build valuable links is by building relationships with similar, yet non competing, sites and linking to their sites. By linking to another site, you are telling them that you like what you see and you are willing to refer visitors to them. This will likely result in them returning the favor, however it is certainly not guaranteed.

Press releases and article marketing is another good way to potentially build solid links to your website. If a press release is picked up by a few reputable online publications, it can generate some very high quality links to your site. Make sure that you optimize your press releases and include the proper links.

Other ways to build links that may be indirectly beneficial are YouTube videos, social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. and commenting on other blogs. Even though links from these sites will contain “no follow” tags (which do not help your search engine ranking), they may encourage another site owners to link to you if they like what they see.

The most beneficial thing that you can do to increase the number of links to your site is to regularly update your site and provide high quality content which will make people want to link to you naturally. Get to work!

Technorati Tags: collective clicks, Inbound links, increase traffic, Link Building, search engine optimization

What is PageRank? Why is it important? How can I improve my PageRank?

Before any website can be optimized, you must have an understanding of what PageRank is and how it can be improved so that you can effectively increase your web presence.

PageRank refers to an algorithm created by Google co-founder Larry Page (hence the name, PageRank). This algorithm is used by Google to assign a numerical value, or weight, to each piece of a set of linked documents, i.e. each page of a website, with the purpose of comparing its relative importance within the larger set. PageRank values range from 0-10, 10 being the best and most “important” websites. The PageRank of a given webpage is largely based on the number and quality of inbound links to the particular page. The higher the PageRank of the linking page, the higher the quality of the inbound link will be. There are other minor factors that affect PageRank however inbound links are the largest factor.

A higher PageRank will lead to better searchablilty and high ranking in Google search results. Therefore, it is crucial to maximize inbound links on reputable sites. However, there are a few things that you do not want to do when trying to increase inbound links. Google frowns upon sites that pay for links for the sole reason of improving their PageRank. This type of manipulation can lead to a decrease in PageRank.

Even though the term “PageRank” is trademarked by Google, Stanford University holds the patent for the PageRank algorithm and has licensed it to Google (and nobody else).

Technorati Tags: collective clicks, increase pagerank, pagerank, SEO

This blog is dedicated to providing internet users valuable information as it pertains to SEO, PPC, and other online marketing channels.

Technorati Tags: collective clicks, content marketing, facebook marketing, Inbound links, increase traffic, Link Building, search engine optimization, twitter marketing, youtube marketing, youtube optimization