Article Marketing is well known.  In general article marketing is a traffic generation method that depends on submitting helpful information (called articles) to sites called “article directories.” This technique is sometimes mistakenly called “Bum Marketing.” Actually, Article Marketing is just one of the many methods that all Bum Marketers use. (Bum Marketing gets its name from the fact that it is so easy even a bum could do it.)

The cool feature of article marketing is that you can count on two different sources of traffic. This is a key point that is often missed by new marketers. If you write a wonderful resource box at the end of the article, those same readers will want more information and click the links in the box. Once the article is syndicated, the links in the resource box will be seen as backlinks to your site by Google, helping you rank in their search engine.

A key consideration in Article Marketing is deciding what Article Directories to send your content to. Having a good article directory list that you can turn to for this is and essential ingredient for a successful article traffic strategy. rather than researching article directory strength yourself, you can easily find lists of directories to choose from. The best article directory list will sort article directories based on their Google page rank and Alexa score.

One challenge that you will run into is that you can find excellent article directory lists, but they are often out of date as soon as they are published. What is needed is a site that ranks article directories on an on-going basis. So, be sure an look for a site that updates their list regularly. One such site can be found on MasonWorld.com. Their article directory site is managed by a Perl script that gets updated every Sunday night.

In closing, article marketing can be a great traffic generation resource. Just make sure that you have the latest data when deciding what article directories to submit to.

As small business owners, we need to find traffic for our websites from wherever we can get it — assuming, of course, that the source is relevant traffic. Irrelevant traffic actually HURTS your website rank in the search engines so we don’t want that. For that reason, we are not fans of reciprocal linking schemes, link farms, etc.

Case in point. I recently met with a new client in Los Angeles who needed to market their small business website. They had previously enjoyed a Page Rank of 5 for their website. Over the past two years, it has dropped to a Page Rank of 3. This was due to a number of factors, but chief among those was the fact that they had been forced into a reciprocal linking arrangement with an unscrupulous vendor. It benefited the vendor tremendously, as they were able to show the search engines that their site was being ranked to from a PR5 website; it made the vendor’s site more “buoyant” (it made it rank higher) in the search engines. The moral of the story is, be very careful if someone offers to do you the “favor” of creating a link to your site, in exchange to linking from yours. It could be detrimental to your website’s Search Engine health.

Nevertheless, you should look for opportunities to receive links from relevant websites whenever possible. It might not seem fair to “take” a link without giving one back, but there are other ways you can help the linking website. If they have a satellite website, you could consider linking to that in the body of one of your posts — relevant topic / contextual link / deep link to the satellite site. Just be careful that the link partner understands that directly linking from the satellite site to their main site will not be nearly as good as if they link in a broad circle of 10 sites before returning to the main site. This is somewhat sophisticated SEO / linking strategy that we’re sharing, so it’s not for everyone to implement on their own. It also implies that you have up to 10 web properties that are all somewhat related that can be daisy chained together… Again, not for everyone. But definitely for businesses that want to insure being on Page 1 on Google.

It requires a lot of time, attention and planning to implement a 10-site daisy chain strategy, and we encourage you to go into that with plenty of forethought. Take the time to not only analyze and eliminate any chance of reciprocal linking or neighbor linking possibilities in the chain, and also insure that whomever in your organization will be managing your website network understands this strategy. A small business SEO Policy is a very smart investment in resources. It takes relatively little time for a website to fall in page rank, and a significantly greater amount of time to gain rank — especially after it is lost.

The underlying issue of Page Rank has been said to be overrated, and it’s largely a symbol of the site’s overall bouyancy in the search engines… it’s not necessarily a goal for a web owner to achieve a particular page rank; it’s more of a barometer or guideline than a definitive benchmark or landing point. The website owner with a page rank of 0 would certainly agree that a page rank of 5 would represent that his/her traffic has achieved more traffic (visitors), more conversions and more leads & sales. That’s really the benchmark we’re aiming for.

Have you ever tried to find a lost friend on the Internet? I have it is not as easy as you might think. I had a good friend in junior high and I have fond memories of hanging out having fun with him. We would hang out listen to music talk just have a great time.

The other day I was thinking about my long-lost friend and I decided to try to find them on the Internet. It seems everyone nowadays uses the Internet so I figured it shouldn’t be difficult to locate him. I pulled up Google typed his name and get pages on pages of results. I checked out page after page but didn’t find any mention of my friend just a lot of people with similar names.

I decided try to narrow my search a bit by including the town and state where we grew up. Unfortunately they were still too many pages to look through for it to be practical to find my lost friend. I decided Google just gave to many results so I would try using a less popular search engine like MSN.

I typed in my friends name and the city and state where we grew up and sure enough I did get a lot fewer results. Instead of hundreds of pages there are only eight. I started looking through those pages of results and I found a couple which I thought would surely lead me to find my lost friend. However, after an hour of searching I still came up empty.

Then I decided to try Yahoo. Since Yahoo search has been around longer than Google or MSN I thought I might have better luck there. Again I entered my friends name the city and state and this time I got about 30 pages of results. I started the arduous task of looking through each and every page and clicking on link after link. Now I was getting frustrated I spent all this time and still cannot find my lost friend.

I pretty much gave up on finding my friend until a couple months later when I discovered reunion.com. I decided to give the site a try and I was amazed at how quickly I was able to turn up results for my lost friend. The service was not free but considering the amount of time I have wasted trying to search in the regular search engines it was definitely worth the small price.

I was able to find a phone number for my friend and I gave them a call. He was very happy to hear from me. In fact, he had been searching for me also. We have a long phone conversation and it turns out that he lived close enough that we could meet for lunch. Although it was more difficult to locate my lost friend than I had imagined it was great to find him and I’m glad I put in the effort.

Nowadays SEO has shifted from the realm of meta-tags to the creation of backlink. Indeed having some quality link pointing to your site should help you get higher in the search engine. One of the most effective ways to get backlink is through the service of press release. In this article I will be providing some quick information on press release and how to make the most of such service.

Through the use of press release you will be creating some publicity to the external world. This is similar to the press release that was posted or faxed to news editors previously. You will be making promotion for your site. By extension you will be getting some targeted traffic to your web site and this can increase your chance of having a sale. Take a look at the links if you need to have a get a good example of a current news website that you can utilize.

The great thing about press release is that it not only drives targeted traffic to your internet site but also provide you valuable backlink from the news site. For most people the backlink itself is quite crucial. If your press release is selected by other webmasters and news site you can anticipate an increase in the amount of links to your site. As a result you can witness a rise in the ranking of your website. When choosing a certain site to publish you can have a challenging time choosing among the several web sites that offer breaking news. As far as possible try to choose a site that holds some interesting PR.

For press releases to be effective it is essential that you pay special attention to its creation. If you have the required budget I will suggest you to look for the help of a professional copywriter. Although the price may be quite high at the beginning you will easily recoup the amount through the profit that your business will be making. The most critical breaking news can become unproductive if it is composed in an amateurish way.

Press releases are often overlooked by business owners when it comes to drawing traffic to their site. For most people it is only a waste of time and money. This is not the truth. If done properly press release can bring some interesting traffic to your site and help boost your search engine ranking.