Offpage Optimization: Does Article Marketing Cut the Mustard?

For those who haven't heard: article marketing is the new offpage optimization strategy that works like magic and won't cost you a dime. What's the strategy? You create an arsenal of short, well-written keyword articles aimed at your target customer and include your URL at the bottom.

Submit the articles to a site like EzineArticles.com where they're indexed by category and picked up by other sites to use as content. Soon, your website URL is getting plastered all over the net, and you're working it in new circles thanks to your newfound expertise in your specialized area.

As you know, specific criteria must be met in order to boost your SE rank using offpage optimization. So the big question might be: does article marketing pack the muscle to push you up the search engines... or is it just a waste of time?

The answer is YES, it DOES pack the muscle... IF you're submitting to hugely popular article sites like EzineArticles.com. Below is a list of the key elements in helping your own page rank through offpage SEO. Does EzineArticles.com have its bases covered? Let's analyze.

Factors that Determine Your Offpage Optimization Success:

- If a site with a higher rank links to you.

Sites with higher rank "carry you along" to a better search engine position. Presently, EzineArticles ranks six out of ten for all websites and first in its article distribution category. You'll quickly learn the advantage to this when you submit a keyword-optimized article to them and then do a Google search on those keywords only to see your EzineArticles article listing come up first or second in the line.

- A large number of sites linking to yours.

Fact: thousands of content publishers pick up articles from EzineArticles.com every day. So for every article you submit, the potential for links back from that article is unlimited. Thanks to EzineArticles.com's popularity, the success of your backlinking strategy is pretty certain.

- The SE rank of the website linking to you is higher than your rank is.

EzineArticles.com has a Google page rank of 6. It stands to reason that if you're just starting out in the web marketing world, you can do your site some good and post your articles with your URL on their website, which will then link back to you and improve your search engine status.

- The page title of the site that's linking to yours is Search Engine Optimized.

Clearly, your site should be associated with other sites who are well-placed within their category. EzineArticles.com features a page title that speaks to its audience of potential users: "Ezine Article Submission - Submit Your Best Articles For Massive Exposure, Ezine Publishers Get 25 Free Article Reprints"

- The anchored links that point from their site to yours contain top keywords.

Search engine crawlers love anchored text links that are keyword-optimized, which is why websites that serve as a "content hub" rank higher than specialized sites and why lesser sites choose add their links to this site for optimal positioning and a win-win situation. EzineArticles.com has guaranteed that every page of their site will be fully indexed thanks to the anchored links that are used to list each topic, and the anchored links used as headlines (which is why it pays to turbo-boost your article headlines with keywords!)

- There are a high number of website linking to the site that's linking to yours.

Every site that picks up content from EzineArticles.com is required to display their link at the bottom of each article used. That amounts to a huge amount of outside links pointing to their site which in turn links to yours.

- The links that point to your site don't share a page with other links.

You'll want your website to be linked from a page on someone else's website that contains as few total links as possible. Why? Less of a chance for the reader to click away. On EzineArticles.com, your link appears at the bottom of your article which appears on its own page.

- There's a large number of outbound links on the website that is linking to you.

The more outbound links the site that's linking to you has, the more they could be considered a "categorical hub" on the web. And the better off you are for getting noticed on their site for its high rank and popularity. EzineArticles.com has an unlimited potential for outbound links due to their inclusion of an author's URL with every article submission.

- The website linking to you is deemed an authority.

Google's ability to deem a site as an "authority site" is what keeps the content on the web legitimate, and why sites that merely throw up a bunch of links to poorly written articles will never have the page rank that a site such as EzineArticles.com who is policing their content and making constant innovations has.

- The unique IP Addresses of the websites linking to you.

Thankfully, no site is able to "pull rank" by throwing up a bunch of links from one high-ranking site and pointing them to a second site. Search Engines read the IP addresses from where each domain originates. Right now you may be thinking, Oh, so those 100 links from articles on EzineArticles.com aren't doing anything to improve my rank anyway? Wrong.

Those links are all being picked up by other sites, who are on the hunt for quality content. If you have something good to say, any number of sites with better rank will pick up your articles and link back to you... each of course, with its own IP Address. This will boost your rank in a big way.

By now it should be crystal clear to anyone reading this why article marketing by way of a high-ranking article distribution site such as EzineArticles.com is the easiest way to "offpage optimize" your website for increased placement on the search engine hierarchy.

In fact... it almost seems like article marketing was created to serve this very purpose...

Copyright 2005 Dina Giolitto. All rights reserved.

Dina Giolitto is the author of ARTICLE POWER: Create Dynamite Web Articles and Watch Your Sales Explode... a 49-page manual covering every aspect of article marketing on the web. Learn about article marketing, copywriting and more at http://www.wordfeeder.com