Search Engine Optimization: Can You Get Results With Article Marketing Only?

If you are relying on organic search traffic to get more website visitors, you need to have an effective article marketing SEO strategy. Many articles and websites online will tell you that article marketing alone will give you great results in terms of search engine rankings. A lot of people are also selling article marketing related products and they are telling you that this is all you need to be successful with your SEO. Can you really believe them? Is article marketing effective from an SEO point of view, and is article marketing really all you need to be successful with your search engine optimization?

Article marketing is a great way to promote a website because it enables you to drive traffic with quality articles, to build backlinks from reputable websites (if your articles are good and engaging to your audience), and to build your reputation as an expert in your niche. You can write articles and submit them to many different websites, not only article directories. This will bring you traffic but more importantly backlinks.

The main benefit from article marketing is actually an SEO benefit, not a traffic benefit. Of course you will get traffic from your articles, especially if they are syndicated on quality high traffic websites, on the top 10 article directories, and/or sent by Ezine publishers to a list of targeted subscribers. Now, the truth is that you will get traffic from your articles but this traffic is marginal compared to the visitors you will get from search engines thanks to your SEO (because your website content ranks high due to the backlinks coming from your articles).

Now that we've said that article marketing is effective from an SEO point of view, does it mean it is enough?

It is surely possible to get very good results from an SEO point of view by only publishing articles to a wide variety of article directories, web 2.0 sites, niche blogs, general blogs, how-to sites, and by syndicating your articles. But there is an issue: the rankings you can get with article marketing alone can be enough to get you some decent website traffic, but these rankings will probably not be long-term. This is why we can say that article marketing alone is not a viable SEO solution on the long-term.

However, for international markets such as the Spanish language market for instance, article marketing can really be enough to get ranked high and stay there for a long time, because first, the competition is not very tough, and second, backlink sources are much more limited than for the English language market. It is however not advisable to only use article marketing, even for international markets, because you never know what will happen to these article directories and other web 2.0 sites. From experience, many websites in the Spanish language market are disappearing overnight for different reasons, and so does the content which is on them.

For the English language market, article marketing should definitely be a part of your SEO strategy, because it is very effective, but you should really diversify your link sources. Use directory submissions, RSS feeds, social media, social bookmarking, press releases, blog commenting, and so on. Anyone who tells you that article marketing is enough is lying to you.

It might be enough at the beginning or for a few months, but on the long-term it won't be. Google wants to see natural linking patterns, and focusing on one linking strategy is never a good idea because it is not natural. If Google sees that 90% of your links come from web 2.0 sites and article directories, this will probably raise a red flag and you might lose some of your hard-earned rankings. This is especially true if your niche has some competition.

The big secret of success with SEO is to diversify your link building. Article marketing is however a very important part of this link building.


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