How To Use Blogs and Articles To Boost Your Search Page Ranking

So your PPC campaign is now producing some great results and your website is up and running.

You should have been able to fine-tune your campaign so that you now have a fairly good idea about who you’re marketing to, what they’re searching for and the highest converting and traffic keywords using website tracking. You should also now have been able to slowly reduce your CPC (cost per click) down to a more reasonable level.

But like all good business owners, you are constantly searching for ways to improve on your ROI (return on investment) which in internet marketing speak means higher click rates. But more importantly, you need understand how to monetize the traffic you are attracting to your website. For traffic means absolutely nothing if you’re not converting it into paying customers.

There are a wide variety of free ways to improve your search engine ranking so that your website or blog shows up on the first page (and hopefully first position) on your relevant keyword search results. In this post I’m going to explain some of the most effective ways in which you can do this.

The generic term used to describe this way of generating good search rankings using free methods is SEM (search engine marketing) marketing or SEO (search engine optimisation).

The main goal of any search engine is to provide the user with the most relevant information possible for any given keyword search. Websites that have good quality and relevant information are rewarded by search engines with high search rankings.

The number of unique links the website has from other websites is one of the main ways that a search engine ranks a website. From the search engine’s point of view, a high number of unique links pointing to a particular website indicates that the website must have something of value to other websites.

There are some important key things you must always understand to have an effective SE marketing strategy:

1. Providing valuable, relevant content on your website should always be your top priority.

Try to avoid filling your website with non-relevant garbage.

All articles should be relevant and consistent to what your website is about. Anyone can download hundreds of articles for free and pad out their website with them, but people will soon realise that the information you’re providing is non-relevant and won’t bother visiting. In order to link to your website, people need to be interested in the articles. And if they won’t link to your website you won’t build your rankings. This takes time – as Julius Caesar once said, “Rome wasn’t built in day.”

There is nothing wrong with using free articles – it’s a great way to get content – but at least try to filter out any non-relevant stuff. And as I keep mentioning in my posts, you MUST, MUST, MUST infuse your articles with your own personality. And I don’t mean be someone you’re not, and make the article a Pulitzer prize winning literary piece. Just write the damn thing in your own words.

2. Make a habit of adding content to your website regularly.

Don’t expect to be able to add 1000 articles to your website in one go and expect a 1st position ranking in Google overnight. To get a high ranking using these free techniques takes time. Try to think of your internet business as an organic thing like an oak seed. It might take a while before you see any results, but given a bit of time and attention, it will grow into something massive and long lasting.

Perhaps the most easiest way to add content on a regular basis is by using a web log (most commonly referred to as a blog). Blogs are websites that have been specifically designed to allow for easy and regular posting of articles. Probably one of the best known and respected platforms currently in use today is WordPress (www.wordpress.org).

You can either host your blog at WordPress itself, but I would highly recommend downloading your own copy and hosting it with your own provider.

Hosting your own WordPress instance gives you full control of your blog – you won’t have the worry of WordPress going down and losing access to your blog. In fact, this blog is hosted on my own webspace using the WordPress platform.

When writing your articles, make sure the content is relevant to your website and make sure it will interest whoever is reading it. Make sure that the article has links back to your other websites, be they your personal website or your lead capture pages, so that you are encouraging people to click them and so build up your authority status and keep the search engines satisfied that your website is a source of good information.

I can’t stress enough how important this is – a search engine’s primary objective is to provide people with the most relevant and best quality information possible. If you can provide the search engines with that, you’ll be rewarded with higher search engine rankings.

3. Get your articles published by as many other websites as possible.

It is important to throw your net wide and get a large variety of different websites linking back to your websites. Use syndication sites, reprint rights, press releases and article distribution sites to get your articles published by other websites, so that you can steadily build up your search ranking.

So just how do you do this?

Well, syndication is one of ways to do it. See that RSS icon in the top right column of this page? Clicking this icon allows people to subscribe to this blog so that as soon as I publish an article (like this one for example), they will automatically get notification of the update.

You can also use article submission sites like www.ezine.com to publish articles.

So how often should I try to publish an article or blog?

It’s really up to you. It depends what your website is and what sort of ranking you want. Publishing one article or blog every few days is the minimum, but basically the more often you update, the more often the search engines will visit and so the quicker your ranking will rise.