Ever wondered how the social media graph may affect the search algorithms in the future?

I personally have, and its my view that Google is showing many signs that it is using the “social graph” more and more to influence its ranking algorithm.

Google recently introduced its new product, Google Buzz, which is incorporated into Gmail. Google Buzz is like twitter in that you can share what you are doing, share videos, images and links etc and generally provide your followers with status updates.

I have had a brief play, and I think it will be a big hit.

It’s my personal view that eventually users will move away from search engines. “What?” you say. “You must be mad mate!”. Well a little yes but let me explain.

The world has changed big time in recent years, not only how people interact online but also in terms of trust. Word-of-mouth has always been a great source of leads and information and I personally think this is the way the web is going. People will not be looking on Google or Bing or any other search engine for information. They will be asking their hundreds or thousands of connected followers that they have within the social sphere in order to find what they are looking for, or answers to questions they may have!

What do you think? I would love to hear your point of view. Feel free to send me a tweet, connect on facebook, mail me or leave a comment below.

Below is the latest blog posts from the guys at SeoMoz. Rand speaks about how they think search is changing. Enjoy.

So, you have a Twitter account, signed up to Facebook, registered with all the best social media bookmarking sites and are blogging like a maniac in order to get your site noticed.

But how can you track mentions, links and opportunities in order to interact with potential and existing customers via the social web?

Lucky for you, I decided to write this post to give you an idea of the kinds of tools that are available to not only monitor brand awareness on social media sites, but to also assist in your companies reputation management.

If customers or potential customers are talking about your business in a negative way, its important that you are aware of this and have the opportunity to join the discussion and rectify things.

So here we go. 7 great tools to help with your reputation management and track brand awareness on the social web.

1. TweetBeep – http://www.tweetbeep.com

Tweetbeep is to Twitter what Google alerts is to Google web search. It allows you to track keywords on twitter and then mails you the results just like Google alerts.

Alerts can be setup hourly or daily and it’s totally free for the first 10 keywords. If you want to track more it costs only $3 per month for 30 keywords, $6 per month for 75, or if you just want to monitor twitter all day you can plump for the premium package at $20 per month allowing you to monitor 200 keywords.

It’s a great tool for tracking not only keywords your competitors maybe targeting, but for also finding recent information, find new clients who are tweeting relevant keywords related to your business or simply for monitor mentions of your domain name or brand etc.

2. Facebook Search – http://www.facebook.com/search/

Facebook has become so popular in last few years. With over 350 million registered users, it’s important that you keep track of anyone that is talking about you.

Facebook search is excellent that it allows you to search within different areas of this monster social site. Areas of search include people, groups, posts by friends, posts by everyone, applications, events and pages.

3. Digg Search – http://www.digg.com/search

Nobody can deny that if you are fortunate enough to have your site dugg by someone (hopefully many people) and can lead to lots more referral traffic to your site. But how do you monitor this? Via the Digg search feature. Simply type in your websites address in the URL above and then view a list of the pages on your site that people have dugg and the amount of times people have voted for it.

4. BackTweets – http://backtweets.com

Backtweets is one of my personal favorites and allows you to monitor links to your site from Twitter.

The interface is dead simple to use and you can also subscribe to the RSS feed for your search OR get alerts via email. So if you want to measure your exposure on Twitter, give BackTweets a go.

5. Social Mention – http://socialmention.com

Social Mention is one of my favorite social media and reputation management tools.  Simply hit the site, enter your url, choose from the dropdown box the places you want to search for mentions of your site, and away you go. Search options include blogosphere, news, comments, networks and others. You can also filter by pagerank and by period.

Another great feature is that it shows you the “sentiment” of each mention, i.e positive, neutral or negative. Not sure how they work this one out but hey who cares, as long as all my mentions are positive, I’m happy.

You can also subscribe to the search results via RSS feed and email like other similar sites which is really handy.

6. Google Alerts – http://google.com/alerts

Google Alerts is a fantastic tool for searching for mentions of yourself, your brand or just keywords you are interested in. When searching you have a number of options including new, web, videos, group or if you want the whole lot go for the comprehensive option.

You also have the option of when you want to be notified of results including “as it happens”, “once a day” or “once a week”. This is an excellent tool. If you monitor some broad keywords, you can get a good picture of which of your competitors are actively promoting their sites.

7. Delicious Search – http://delicious.com/search

When it comes to social media bookmarking, delicious is a giant. Although the links from delicious are no-followed meaning they do not pass any link juice, you may get some click throughs and who knows, maybe some credit from Google? You don’t really believe what Google tell you about no-follow do you?

When you land on the page above, simply enter your url, your brand or related keywords and see what you can un-earth.

As usual, please feel free to bookmark this below or retweet. You can also follow me on twitter , become a fan on Facebook or subscribe via email to the right.

After sitting through yet another SEO webinar and reading more and more posts on the web in recent days, it has become very clear to me that there are a huge amount of new and experienced SEO’s out there who seem to be fixated on trying to reverse engineer the Google ranking algorithm.

Many of them spend hours writing about what they “believe” to be the case but have no substantial evidence to back up their claims. Just visit any SEO forum and you will find hundreds of threads created by people claiming that this is the best approach or this is the best method in building links. What is clear is that a lot of these people spend an awful lot of time hanging out in forums. What is it they say? “advice is the cheapest commodity around”. Everyone has some to share!

Strategies built on speculation and taken from those who either claim to have the knowledge, or listen to the other lemmings, are doomed to failure. So people. Stop trying to read Google’s minds and reverse engineer the algorithm, as you just can’t do it. Even if you can work out that H1 tags are no longer of any value, or that links from a certain site appears to pass link juice, the algorithm is constantly being evolved with Google changing their 200+ signals on a regular basis.

One thing you can take to the bank though is that Google are ALWAYS looking for the signals that reflect trust, authority, relevance and value. Let me say that again “TRUST”, “AUTHORITY”,”RELEVANCE” and “VALUE”!

The key steps to any online marketing strategy are:-

1. Build a site that DOESN’T have all the bells and whistles but serves a purpose, provides great unique, interesting and ground breaking content in the form of blog posts, articles, videos, downloads and other great content.
2. Add a blog to your site with RSS feed, sharing widgets and email subscription.
3. Setup accounts on social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Youtube.
4. Promote your content on these channels by building a community around your brand, products and services. Your site becomes a hub.
5. Bookmark your new posts and content on sites such as digg, reddit and delicious.
6. Contact industry leading bloggers in order to help promote your content further.
7. Make sure you post consistently with well researched content.
   Interact online via social media in order to build trust, transparency, brand awareness and mind share.
8. Monitor and track your progress using your key performance indicators and ascertain and put more effort into best performing channels.

This is what users want! So give it to them and they will love you for it and tell the world just how great you are.

Who knows, you may even get a sale or two.

As ever, please feel free to subscribe to my blog via RSS or via email, comment below, follow me on twitter or become a fan on facebook.

When it comes to measuring the effectiveness of your online marketing campaigns, there are many different KPI’s that can be used, with some providing better insights than others. Some people measure the number of inbound links and indexed pages with others using Google toolbar page rank and keyword rankings.

But before using any metric, it’s important to know WHY you are using it and what each metric actually signifies. For example, you may say, “wow, my site has 10,000 links”, but when those 10,000 links come from 10 domains this doesn’t really measure popularity or reach does it? Besides, Google will probably have de-valued 9,990 of them anyway.

In my last post 7 Must-Do Inbound Marketing Practices For 2010 (and beyond) I spoke about some of the best inbound marketing methods you can use in 2010 and beyond in order to attract more visitors to your website. In this post, I will discuss some of the KPI’s you can use in order to measure the success of those practices and why each is so effective in finding out whether you are truly connecting with your customers.

1. Number Of Organic Keywords Found With
If you have ever looked at your traffic and keyword stats you will notice that approximately 80% of keywords used to find your site are keywords that you most probably didn’t optimise for. This is more commonly referred to as the long tail and is why it is so important that you create a site that has lots of textual content that can be indexed by the search engines.

So, the more content you have, the more keywords and search phrases you will be found with. Another great benefit of being found with these long tail searches is that they are normally very highly targeted and convert much better compared to broad keywords.

So, if the number of individual keywords you are being found with (and you can find this using any analytics program) is rising consistently, this is a good sign that you are creating a content rich site.

2. Number Of Linking Domains
Another great KPI is the number of linking domains. Many people focus on purely the number of links coming into your site from other websites, but this is wrong. It’s very easy to get a link from a site that’s placed in the footer which means that you may have a link on 10,000 pages. Do you think Google will count all of these? Dream on!

This is why a more important KPI is the number of unique domains linking to you, as this is a greater indicator to Google and the other engines that you have great link popularity. 500 unique domains linking to you are far more valuable than 20,000 links from 20 domains. Unless of course the 20 sites are extremely powerful.

3 . Number Of Pages Indexed
Another great KPI which is important to keep track of is the number of pages on your site that are indexed in the major search engines. The more content you have indexed, the more likely it is that you will attract lots of highly targeted long tail traffic.

4. Number Of Branded Searches
A strong indicator that you are starting to gain greater brand awareness are instances of branded searches within your logs and analytics. So, any search that includes your company name in it can be considered a branded search. Make sure you monitor these on a regular basis.

5. Number Of Blog Subscribers
If you have a blog and are using it in order to display your writing talents then you want to keep track of how many people are subscribed to it via RSS. This can be done by using Feedburner and can provide you with regular stats on how many people you have hanging on your every word!

6. Number Of Twitter Followers
Twitter has become a great channel for drawing visitors into your site. It’s a great way to build a community of followers for your business and also a great way of establishing a connection with your clients and becoming more “transparent”. The number of followers you have can be a good indicator of the kind of reach and “mind share” you are starting to build.

7. Number Of Facebook Fans
Like Twitter, Facebook is extremely popular, with hundreds of millions of users logging in every day. By creating a fan/business page on Facebook, you give your existing and potential customers the opportunity to not only get updates on your company, but also give them the opportunity to converse with you directly. Tracking and increasing the number of Facebook fans you have is another signal that you are gaining more influence and mind share within your market.

So remember. If you are tracking any KPI, make sure you know exactly why you are tracking it and what it signifies.

Related Post: 7 Must-Do Inbound Marketing Practices For 2010 (and beyond)



Historically, I have offered core organic SEO services to my clients. But in the new year I will most definitely be incorporating many extra marketing strategies into the mix. Not only is search changing in a big way, but also, the approach I take in order to market my clients services and products.

SEO is great for attracting new organic search traffic and visitors and myself and my clients have had much success, but alone It is not enough. In a changing online world of search a more holistic approach has to be adopted in order to make use of all the channels that are available to marketers.

With the recent introduction of personalised search, universal search and real time search, obtaining top 10 placement on Google is becoming harder and harder, and we all know that languishing on page 2 or more is of no use whatsoever. As Google butchers the results pages more and more, organic results are getting pushed further and further down the pecking order and lets face it, organic search results just don’t pay the bills for Google do they?

This is why the “social web” has become so important. Couple this with an ever increasing need for trust in the world we live in, its important if not vital, that we truly “connect” with our customers and establish more engaging business relationships both online and offline.

So trust, credibility, transparency and UVP (Unique Value Proposition) will become even more important. But how can we adopt such an approach? Simple. By practicing the below and using them as part of your inbound marketing mix.

1. Use Social Media – In the last couple of years social media has seen a huge spike in usage. Facebook now has around 350 million active users 65 million of these are accessing via mobile devices! Then we have Twitter which has a reputed following of 80 million users its easy to see that if utilised ethically, this is a great channel to help increase brand awareness. But unless you have some remarkable content to market (#3 below) you wont get far.
2. Start Blogging – There were 133 million blogs online in January 2009 and I am sure that this number has exceeded 150 million or more over the last 12 months. By creating a blog with an RSS feed you get the opportunity to create regular “remarkable” content and have people subscribe to it automatically using their feed readers. If you use applications such as twitterfeed you can also automatically post to Twitter and Facebook. A blog is a must have for any business and if you don’t have one, you are missing a great opportunity.
3. Create Highly Focused Content – With inbound marketing the main focus is that you are creating a “hub” that draws people into your site and keeps them there by providing great content and ways to “stay connected” (RSS feed, Twitter, FB etc) so that you can keep them coming back. Content can be informative blog posts, interviews with industry leaders, videos, infographics, how to’s, top x lists, industry news or anything else provided by your creative juices. Remember, “You have to give in order to get!”
4. Use Your RSS Feed – As mentioned in #2. If you create a blog you need to allow people to view your posts and content not just directly on your site but indirectly via a blog feed reader such as Google reader.
5. Practice Regular Blog Commenting – As there are so many blogs out there, they provide you with a great way of enforcing your own authority within your field. Most blogs allow you to add a comment at the end of each post, so why not use this opportunity to provide your own opinion. You can agree, disagree, add further resources or info or enforce what the blogger is saying. By blog commenting on a regular basis you start to become “known” within your niche and can help to establish yourself as an authority. Users can then click on your link in order to view your site. It’s a good way to gain extra visitors to your site if done ethically, i.e., not in a spammy fashion. If you follow the blogs via RSS reader, why not make sure that you are always one of the first to comment making sure that everyone gets to read your comment rather than have it buried by dozens of others?
6. Install A Bookmarking Widget – A bookmarking widget is easily integrated into any site and allows users to bookmark, email to a friend or add your page to social media sites. It’s easy to implement and is effective in gaining more links and mind share. So do it! No excuses. I recommend addthis.com
7. Make Sure Your Site Is Mobile Friendly – Apparently there are more mobiles in the world than there are computers and TV’s! 65 million people access Facebook using mobile devices! There are going to be many more in the coming months and years. Mobile web is picking up momentum in a big way. Google has now brought out its own Nexus One smart phone which I am sure will sell like crazy and we also have the Apple iphone and other such devices which are already well established. The “mobile web” is going to be huge and means that owners are going to have to make sure that their websites are “mobile friendly” if they want to garner visits from the more tech savvy user.

I would love to hear your views on this and perhaps even your own tips for marketing online in 2010. As ever, please feel free to comment below, bookmark, subscribe to my feed or connect with me on Twitter.

The web has become the numero uno when it comes to marketing your business. In the early years of the web it was relatively easy to promote your business and make lots of money. I would like to say its “easy” to make money today, but what with the global economic meltdown there is no doubt that there is a lot less money in circulation. Couple this with the fact that the web has become a lot more saturated with companies looking to take advantage of this “new medium” and you can see that things are a lot harder than they were in the past.

But saying that, there are still great opportunities to gain greater exposure for your business and yes, make money. The Internet is still the most cost effective way to make money and gain greater exposure. Don’t believe me? Think about Barack Obama and how he used inbound internet marketing to defeat Hilary Clinton who had a much bigger budget. All thanks to a great web strategy and something that we can all replicate.

The web is changing, search engines are changing and users are changing in the way they interact with each other and in the way they use the internet to carry out everyday tasks.

We have now become so accustomed to “outbound marketing” where you “push” your products and services to people, that we have all become that little bit more adept at blocking out this “noise”. Think of banners for example, when was the last time you really stopped to read what they had to offer? They and many other channels have become far less effective in winning the mind share of website visitors.

When I say search engines are changing, I refer to the fact that possibly over the next 12 months or so, there will be two major search engines, Google and Bing. Yahoo is set to use the Bing search engine which means there will be a 80/20 split between the two engines. “So what”, you say. “How does that affect me and my website marketing?”.

Well, Google are rampant. They are looking to make more and more money(aren’t we all) and they are doing a great job at doing just that. Google are working extremely hard to obtain as much information about us as they can, so that they can use the organic search engines results pages to sell more highly targeted advertising space. Think, PPA(pay per action), universal search, video, images, real time web and god knows what else.

And how are they going to obtain such information? Well they already are. Think Google adwords, your Google account that tracks your surfing and search habits, cookies, Google Chrome browser (soon to be released), Google Toolbar, Googles own smart phone (Nexus One), Gmail and of course their many other web properties where they can monitor the actions of millions of daily visitors. This is just a few I have mentioned. I am sure you can think of many others.

What this means is that your normal organic results will be used far more for well targeted advertising, pushing the normal organic listings down the page and off to the world of page 2 obscurity.

So, for me, the key for the future is an inbound marketing approach. Using your website as a hub and using the social web including Twitter and Facebook, the “blogosphere” and RSS feeds (External sites and apps) etc to drive visitors to your site.

Communities and quality content are also going to be a deciding factor. It is going to be even more beneficial for businesses to create quality content and engaging media in order to help keep users coming back again and again and to establish themselves as the authority within their niche.

The web is changing. If you don’t adapt and start being more creative and start “reaching out” to your customers by offering them something of value, you’re doomed to online failure.

I work closely with the Redline Company who are a leading marketing company here on the Costa del Sol and recently had the privelege of doing a radio interview on Central FM with George Prior where I spoke about SEO and how it can benefit all companies who have an online presence.

The interview is aimed at those who are not familiar with SEO and who maybe considering having some SEO done on their site. So hopefully the interview may provide you with answers to questions you may have in regards to my own services or to SEO in general. Happy listening!!

So many people are obsessed. Obsessed with website TRAFFIC that is. It would seem that many are more concerned with attracting HUGE volumes of traffic with little regard to the quality of the visitors and whether or not they are converting into paying customers. Afterall, whats the point in spending loads of money on promoting your site online, when your bounce rate is 70% and very few of the visitors are doing what you actually want them to do, ie buy a product, sign up to your newsletter or make an enquiry?

It’s easy to lose focus of what our aims are. How many of us have drifted in and out of life forgetting why we are really here and not establishing a purpose for our lives? The same  applies to our websites. It’s easy to lose site of the actions we want our visitors to take.

Top Ranking For Broad Keyords – The Misconception

The truth is that many people think that ranking in the top 10 for the really competitive search terms is going to bring them huge numbers of visitors. The fact is that unless you are in the top 3, you will see very few visitors.

As a rule of thumb (and this was researched some time back) if you are placed in the top 5 for any given keyword, you can expect the following percentage of traffic numbers:

#1 – 42%

#2 – 11.9%

#3 – 8.5%

#4 – 6.1%

#5 – 4.9%

So for example. If a given search for example “holiday spain” receives around 500 organic searches per month, you can expect 210 clicks per month if you are in the #1 position. Now, you can see that if you are #2 you will get approximately 60 visits per month and for #3 around 45 visits per month. The further down you are in the top 10 the less traffic you will get. Not great eh?

When you consider just how much time, money, sweat and effort it will take to get to the #1 position, you can begin to see how chasing broad high volume keywords in most cases is a LOSING battle.

The “Long Tail” has been cited a lot in SEO circles over the last year or so and although many optimizers are now familiar with the concept, this is not really the case with the average client and website owner.

So, the main idea of this post is to make SEO clients and SEO newbie practioners aware of what Long Tail keywords are, why they are more valuable than your average “broad keywords” and in my next post, how you can learn neat techniques to help you find long tail keyword opportunities in order to attract those clients who are just waiting to pay for your service or product.

So without further a do, take a look at the image below.

Long Tail Traffic

The image above depicts typical search volumes for almost all websites. To the left we have the “broad keywords” (red) and to the right we have the “long tail keywords” (green). The tail is much longer than can be shown in our chart but imagine it is around 3 times longer, and you get the picture.

What this means is that collectively, the long tail traffic equates to around 75-80% of a websites search traffic.

Typical Long Tail Searches

So that you know what I am referring to when speaking about long tail and broad or “short tail” keywords here are two examples.

“spain property”

“apartments for sale in los flamingos marbella”

See the difference? One is highly targeted, the other is very broad.

The question is, whats the difference between the two searchers and which one would you rather have?

Well the broad searcher is at the bottom of the buying process. Generally people who are looking to buy property and are serious are more specific with their searches as they know just what they want. So someone who searches for “spain property” or something similar is very unclear about what they want and is likely to be one of those one page visitors, “window shoppers” if you like.

The long tail searcher on the other hand is what we want. They are more precise with their searches, they are ready to buy and have a clear vision of what it is they want. All you have to do is give it to them!

Advantages Of Long Tail Traffic

There are a number of advantages of long tail traffic including

1. Less Competition – Long tail keywords are generally much much easier to rank for as your competitors chase the broader keywords thinking there is “gold in them there hills”.

2. Costs Less – With links having become somewhat of a commodity, buying any kind of link becomes expensive. This is not the case with the long tail as you do not need to spend so much time and money link building although you cant stop that link building campaign altogether.

3. More Convertible – There can be no doubt. The long tail is the pot of gold. The holy grail of search traffic. The long tail converts far better than the broad search terms.

What You Need To Target the Long Tail Keywords

There is one thing you will most definitely need when targeting the long tail keywords.

“Unique” CONTENT – Content is king for sure. Without it, you have no content to optimize for the long tail keywords. its also important that the content you have on your site is not duplicated, ie not scraped from other sites on the web. Google and the other engines will not index duplicate content, meaning your pages will be of no use and will not be shown in the search results.

Example Of A Long Tail Strategy

The Real Estate Website – The real estate industry is tough! With so many sites out there competing for so few customers its a tough niche to do well in. There are ways that you can target the long tail though and bring in lots more relevant traffic.

1. Make sure your deeper listings are unique content and NOT MLS syndicated. This is a tough proposition for most but is KEY to successfully targeting the long tail.

2. Make sure that as many of your listings are crawlable and indexed.

3. Add your most important listings pages to your sitemap.

4. Be sure to link to your deep content via featured listings that rotate on the site, or via regular blog posting and other internal link opportunities.

5. Bookmark as many of your most important listings as possible to help the engines and users find them.

6. Brainstorm with colleagues and friends as many keywords, modifiers and descriptors as possible. (I will show you how to do this in my next post)

7. Make sure that the listings are well optimized, ie title tags, alt tags meta data and that the main copy/text is keyword rich. Try to mention words that your searchers may use such as disabled friendly, pet friendly, villa, apartment, private pool, close to shops, close to bearch etc etc. Your users do use these words, trust me!

How To Research And Find Long Tail Keywords

Stay tuned. My next post will detail a number of techniques that you can use to carry out long tail keyword research.

Use Synonyms and Write Naturally to Avoid Keyword Stuffing and Aid Readability

We’ve all seen it on our travels when browsing the web. Pages that have been stuffed with keywords to supposedly help “increase ranking” have become an all too often occurrence. It’s evident that many SEO’s and webmasters are constantly looking for ways to squeeze every last ounce of SEO out of their pages, but sadly, they are living in the past.

Keyword stuffing went out with the square wheel and by inserting too many occurrences of targeted keywords within your page copy, your page becomes ugly and completely unreadable to your visitors. Boy, what a turn off!!

The key is to use synonyms. The reason being is that Google and other search engines have become so sophisticated that they have an excellent understanding of the relationships between different words.

If you go to Google for example and enter into the search box “~property” (without the quotes) and then hit search, you will notice that within the search results Google highlights certain words in bold. You will notice that there are many bolded synonyms for example “estate agents”, “homes” and “real estate” that Google deems to be related and which have a semantic relationship.

So that you can view all of the synonyms that Google is aware of for this particular word try something like “~property -homes -estate agents -real estate. Each time you find new ones, write them down and then append another -word to the end of the search. You will notice that the number of search results reduces each time.

So now you know which words Google associates with others, you can look at replacing some of your keywords and internal anchor texts with their synonyms which will ultimately make your sites content more readable and look well….less spammy!

Until next time..

For those who do not know, article marketing is a term used to describe the practice of writing articles and sometimes distributing articles via distribution services such as isnare.com and articlemarketer.com or just by adding them to article directories such as ezinearticles.com or buzzle.com

The idea behind it is that you write an informative article on your topic/niche, and put it in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Then at the bottom of the article (or sometimes within it), you will have the option to add your little bit of self promotion and link to your website via the resource box.

Article marketing is a real opportunity for you to establish yourself as an authority within your field, although judging by a lot of what gets placed onto most article directories, this is not always the case!

There has been much comment in the past as to the value of article marketing with some citing that “you may as well put the articles on your own site” or “it’s going to be seen as duplicate content if you distribute it to lots of websites”. Although both of these are valid points, there are a number of benefits to article marketing that I would like to mention, including:-

Presenting Yourself As An Expert

Let’s face it, when looking for information we want to read something that is concise, interesting, and is well researched. By writing well crafted articles, you establish yourself as someone who is a trusted expert and source of quality information.

Helping To Build Links

By placing articles on some of the better directories such as Ezinearticles and Buzzle,  you will find that your articles not only rank well (if optimized correctly) but also inherit page rank, which in turn “bleeds” page rank back to your site through your link.

While many believe that distributing articles to more than one website constitutes duplicate content and therefore will not pass any real SEO value, it must not be forgotten that its not JUST about SEO. Distributing your article to hundreds of websites gives your website greater visibility and hopefully, more visits and natural links.

Obtaining Click Throughs

Another obvious benefit is click throughs. By placing information within the resource box at the bottom of your article, you are offering the reader the ability to investigate your services or products further, after all, if I have just read a great article I will be really interested in reading more content from this author or website.

Establishing Trust

Trust is vital, not only in SEO, but in business. By writing good content you are showing the world that you are an expert within your field and what you say is worth listening too. The fact also that a lot of top article directories will only approve quality articles, also adds to your trust brownie points.

So there you have it. A number of reasons why article marketing is still a valuable method for SEO and why you should be using it to establish yourself as a trusted resource.