Article marketing is among the very best ways  to promote a website.  Whether your website is about automobiles, health and wellness or online degrees, an aggressive, well-conceived article marketing campaign can  markedly boost  your search engine rankings in  Yahoo, Bing, Google  and the so-called minor search engines.   Don’t forget , the links to your website that come as the result of  article marketing  will not in themselves  send hundreds of visitors  to you ; the value of article marketing is that it will improve your search engine rankings for the keywords you select .  And, as you are probably aware , visitors who reach your site after doing a search are  much  more likely to be interested in it than are visitors who reach your site as a result of advertising.

To be most effective , article marketing must be  sustained .  If you submit a couple of articles a week for a month or two and then stop, any gains you make in ranking will probably be  erased soon by your more persistent competitors  .

And, you must choose your anchor text…the  words or phrases  from which you link to your website… with care .  Your anchor text should rotate between the keywords people are most likely to use when trying to find a website like yours.   Notice that I used the word “rotate”.

That’s because one of the greatest  errors  article marketers make is to use the same  keyword or phrase as the anchor text in all of the links in  the articles they write for publication .  For  example , if you have a website which lists and describes online educational programs , you may be tempted to write articles only about online education and include two links in each article using “online education” as your anchor text.  That seems perfectly logical, right?

But, if you did that, you’d be making two critical mistakes…the same mistakes made by  many  article marketers.   One would be using the same keywords all the time.  Rotating anchor text to include terms like online universities, online degree programs, online  undergraduate programs , and similar terms will look much more natural to Google and  Yahoo , and may therefore result in your links being more highly valued in calculating your ranking.  

Your second mistake in the example above would be  submitting articles  only about the subject of your website.  Sure, it seems logical that the owner of an education website could best promote his or her site by writing and submitting articles and blog posts on education-related subjects, and to some extent that is true.  However, by writing about education-related subjects  exclusively , he or she would be  severely limiting  the number of websites and blogs which would consider publishing his or her articles and posts.

A  better conceived  strategy would be to write some number of articles, perhaps one of four or one of five, on a wide variety of  subjects.  Articles on automobile safety, health, and home and family have the potential to be published in blogs and on websites which would not  consider articles on an educational topic like online colleges, for instance.  Thus, rotating article topics will result in greater  exposure and more links than limiting yourself to one or two topics .