Article marketing is one of the hottest web site promotion strategies to get your message out to your target market. Did you know it also improves your link popularity and link quality? Read on to learn how these two off page search engine optimization factors can be positively influenced by article marketing. Search engine bots to scour the internet and index the vast number of web pages using complicated algorithms to determine the relevancy and ranking of each web site. One way to positively influence your web site ranking is through offpage search engine optimization tactics. Off page optimization tactics focus on improving link popularity and link quality.

539584_24869488Search engines use these two off page optimization factors to influence your ranking. Generally speaking, link popularity refers to the number of links point back to your web site. Link quality refers to the importance of the web sites that are pointing to your website, whether the content of the site linking to you is related, and the anchor text in the back link. To improve your search engine ranking, boost your link popularity and the quality of incoming links. Article marketing is a proven strategy for boosting your link popularity and link quality. Here is why. Each article you prepare for promotion will include a short resource box at the end of the article. This is where you should add at least one link back to your web site. Submit the article to multiple article directories and you receive a link back to your web site from each of those article directories. If other web site owners looking for content use your article on their web site, blog, newsletter or ezine, you will also get a link back from each of those sites as well. The more compelling your articles are, the more they will proliferate. As your articles proliferate, you get more back links. Think about it. This proliferation improves link popularity.

The second benefit of article marketing is improved link quality. You positively affect link quality in the article text and article resource box. Your article text should relate to your web site content and use your primary keyword phrases sparingly within the body of the article. Link quality is also influenced in the resource box at the end of your article. There are two objectives you should focus on when writing the resource box text.

First, include a catchy phrase that draws in the reader and encourage them to click through to your web site. The secondary objective of the resource box is to positively influence your link quality. This is done through the anchor text and words surrounding the anchor text. Anchor text is the text a user sees and clicks when clicking a link on a web page. Choose your anchor text wisely. It affects link quality. Your anchor text in the resource box should include your most relevant keywords. This will positively affect your search engine ranking for those keywords. As an example, if your website sells blue widgets you want the anchor text took look like those below. (Note: replace the square brackets with angle brackets):

[a href=’http://www.yoursite.com’]Blue Widgets[/a] Not this:
[a href=’http://www.yoursite.com’]www.yoursite.com[/a] To take this one step further, use a variety of anchor text phrases relevant to your most important keywords. Too many links pointing back to your site that use the same anchor text may be interpreted as spamming by the search engines. Using the above example, alter your anchor text to include other related terms such as unique widgets, unique blue widgets, quality widgets and decorative widgets. You get the idea. This is how you affect the link quality during your article marketing efforts. As you can see, article marketing can improve both link popularity and link quality. Improving these two off page optimization factors should be part of your overall strategy to improve your web site ranking and maximize organic traffic. Get on the article marketing bandwagon today.