There is a lot of advice floating around the internet about article marketing. Like any freely available advice -- some of it is good, and some of this advice is downright hurtful for you, and your website, in the long run. Now, there are a couple of different ways that you can go about article marketing -- you can use it as a tool to generate direct traffic from popular article directories, or you can use it as a tool to help improve your website's ranking in search engines. Some people like to have it both ways -- while it works for some, it doesn't always work out as well for others. However, for those who use article marketing for SEO, the number one mistake that they make is creating new competition for their primary key words. It seems that everybody and their brother knows and understands that there is a potential traffic goldmine by targeting long-tail keywords. And yes, it is fairly easy to grab prominent rankings for slightly off-the-mark key phrases that still cater to a popular keyword market. However, if your goals for article marketing include improving your website's rankings for a specific longtail keyphrase -- the last thing that you should be doing is using those longtail keywords as the focal point of your articles that you are submitting to article directories. As an example, let's say that we wanted to target the long tail key phrase "article marketing for SEO". Now, this phrase is not very good in terms of estimated search volume, however, it fits this article quite nicely. So, according to Google -- there are around 7,000 websites that return as a match to the keyphrase that we want our website, or web page, to rank highly for. What happens when we create an article about article marketing for SEO, and then subsequently submit that article to any number of article directories, is that we are increasing the number of websites that have the potential to rank highly for that longtail keyword phrase. Moreover, if these articles are syndicated further to other third-party websites, we could easily be increasing the direct competition for this longtail keyphrase by hundreds of websites -- this is just not smart marketing. Sure, by placing links at the bottom of all the articles back to our website, and especially if we use the phrase "article marketing for SEO" as the anchor text that points back to our website -- we will get some benefits out of our article marketing strategy, no doubt. However, the real winners here are the article directories where we are placing the content that was designed to attract individuals who we would prefer to find our own website through search engines. Well, those article directories and potentially the other websites who use our articles to help their own rankings. Article marketing is a great tool for online business owners who want to increase the exposure of their websites. However, when you're performing article marketing for SEO purposes, and especially if you are targeting longtail keyword phrases -- you need to understand that with each copy of your keyword targeted article that is online, you are just making it that much more difficult for your own website to rank for those particular keywords. Rob Ferrall is the editor of $10 Articles, a SEO content writing service offering 400 word articles for $10 each.
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