There are several steps, elements and techniques that go into successful articles written for search engine marketing (SEM). The steps include creating lists of topics that incorporate your keywords in them, researching those topics and then writing the actual articles.  The elements include choosing keywords and structuring an article while using techniques that make readers want to read your article and complete your desired call to action.

Keywords and Relevant Back Links

A keyword is the word or phrase that you are trying to get the highest ranking for in the search engine results pages (SERP).  If you own an auto body shop in Medford then you'd want to place high for terms like "Medford Oregon Auto Body Parts", "Medford auto parts", "Auto Body shop Medford" "97504 auto repair" etc.  A keyword is not only one word, but refers to phrases as well.  It is the goal of the article to incorporate your keywords with information that readers will find interesting and enticing enough to continue reading and to then arrive at your site.  It is also a great way of generating links back to your site. 

A good back linking strategy will have your keywords placed in the anchor text (text part of a link) at other sites and lead back to a page in your site with the same keywords. Here's an example:  You have an article which is at WordPress.com titled "Medford Auto Body Shop Wins Innovative Car Store of the Month".  In that article you have the keyword "Medford auto body shop"; the actual line the link appears in is:

The Medford auto body shop, Panthers recently was given the award for Innovative Car Store of the Month based on the number of cars they inexpensively retro-fitted with bio-diesel fuel using their patent pending process. 

The link is under the text "Medford auto body shop" and the link goes back to their web site page where the actual content at the site has the same words "Medford auto body store."  It is our goal to create relevant back links which will help the search engines discover why your site should be in the top of the SERPs.

Getting Your Internet Marketing Articles Started

Making a list of articles at one sitting with the ideas you have for articles is a recommended way to get material for numerous articles at one time. You don't have to actually write the articles at that time (unless you're inspired and want to), but you’ll have your master list made up and ready.  Sometimes it takes a little time to incubate your ideas and you may want to keep and add notes on what you want to go into each article. 
If on the day that you are ready to write, you find that you have writer's block, just start writing about anything that goes through your mind for a few minutes and you'll start to see that shortly you will be able to write what you set out to – your articles based on your list and notes.  If all you can produce are 5-7 minutes a time for a particular article, do that and then go on to another article in your list.  Just try to work at least for 20-30 minutes of writing at a time.  After a few sessions you'll have a bunch of articles.

Article Structure

Resource Box: Some Article Sites will not allow you to use HTML / Links in the articles they publish, but will allow you a resource box where you can place a couple of lines of text there with a couple of back links.  Please make sure to include one with your article.  You would usually talk about the author and their relation to the subject.  That is where the keyword back link comes into play.  Here is an example:

Mike Medley is an award winning Medford Auto Body Shop owner who has created a patent pending Bio-Diesel auto conversion process.

1. Title:
   The most important place your keywords should appear is in the title tag of the page. Search engines read English content left to right so the most important keywords should occur earlier in the title if possible. Either way they must be in the title as well as the "answer/help/info" that should communicate what the ensuing content will offer.  Think of the title tag as the "Book Title".  Capitalize each first letter in the title, but do not capitalize full words.  One other note about the title is that if it is the title tag then it will also be used by search engines as the title of your link (see image}.
    
2. First Paragraph: 
   Introduction/Summary: Here's where you'll lay out what your article is about.  You want to use your keywords again in the opening sentence, but in a way that a reader would find useful.  Thoughtful and well-liked articles try and solve some kind of problem for the reader so you should try and describe what problem will be solved by the article you are writing. Some search engines and article directory sites might use this first sentence or two as the description (see image above) of the content so make sure your first lines are appealing and sell the search engine user as well.
3. Body:
   • Here is where you will be presenting your solution to the problem, your rewarding information to the reader that will keep them interested and feel like they haven’t wasted their time in their pursuit of finding the product that you want to sell them. 
   • Try to stay on target and don’t go off on tangents or try to cover material that is not the focus of your article and solution.
   • Use a voice you are comfortable with.  If you are the kind of writer that likes to relay personal stories that enhance your point, use that and see if it works for you.
   • Bullet points and subheadings are great ways to break up a page and it has been shown that readers tend to digest information a little easier that way as their eyes naturally are curious about the pattern.
   • You don't want your reader to feel like they're reading a promotion for your company because they will just want to leave the page right away.  The key is crafting content that integrates keywords in a way that doesn’t offend the reader and actually leaves them feeling like they gained useful knowledge and solved a problem.
4. Conclusion:
   Summarize how the article you just wrote solves the problem or enhances the reader’s life.  A call to action should also be contained in the final paragraph – lead the reader to the next destination, your site/money page. Try and end the last sentence with a final positive wrap up and use your keywords.
5. Resource Box:
   Some Article Sites will not allow you to use HTML / Links in the articles they publish, but will allow you a resource box where you can place a couple of lines of text there with a couple of back links.  Please make sure to include one with your article.  You would usually talk about the author and their relation to the subject.  That is where the keyword back link comes into play.  Here is an example:

   Mike Medley is an award winning Medford Auto Body Shop owner who has created a patent pending Bio-Diesel auto conversion process.

Techniques and Ideas for Articles

1. "Link baiting".  Some great ideas for articles that are link bait are how to's and lists. Possibly the best link baiting is "How To" articles.  People love tips and tricks that can reduce the time, aggravation, money etc. that they spend.
   By focusing on the easier, better and happier, you are using the key to great "how to" headlines and content.  Actually saying in words what people know can help them often seems counter-intuitive and yet people like to have affirmations of what they know.
2. The Twice Helping headline – "How to win friends and influence people".  The first help also subconsciously informs the second one.  If you win friends then you can influence people. Another famous one is "How to Save Time and Get Things Done"
3. How to (thing you have to do) that (rewards you for the task). "How to Get a Mortgage That Cuts your Monthly Payment in Half".  This can also take the form without using the words – How to:  Attract thousands Of Birds With A Techno Bird Feeder.
4. Scoops – Do you know something about your industry / products that no one else has reported yet?
5. Tools – Can you discuss a very useful tool that would save people time, money or aggravation?
6. Contests – Are you running any you'd like to promote?  Make sure to check with legal first.\
7. Are you first at something? Is there something in your product/service/industry/niche that you are first at and can brag about?
8. Awards / Charity – Have you won something or helped a charity/function.  This is great for press releases
9. List – Is there a list you can provide of items that would help people in your field?
10. Passion and Humor.  Together or separately they come through in an article if they are true and believable.  You will find your voice by continuing to write.
11. Usefulness – Always give a reason why your product service improves the usefulness to the reader

Understanding why keywords and links are important and then by making a list of topics with relevant keywords and researching them, you will be able to come up with many different successful articles.  There are many forms of link bait that attract readers and they can be used over and over again.  A successful internet marketing article will contain information that is so useful to a reader that they will want to follow your call to action and visit your site. 

Nowadays, people just do not find businesses and services the way that it was done 50 or even 10 years ago.  The internet has changed all that with instant comparisons, maps, community review sites, videos, photos and search engines.  How is a local business supposed to compete with national and international companies?  They too must learn to leverage the internet and local searches through search engine optimization and social network marketing and bookmarking. 

Traditionally people would do "Searches" for businesses by looking in their phone books, newspaper,  magazines, mail and home circulars. Radio and Television advertising were the biggest winners in the advertising market even a few years ago.  Almost all of those businesses have seen a dramatic fall in revenue.  Whereas the classified ad was one of the main source of revenue for newspapers, today most are seeing miniscule traffic when compared with an internet giant like Craigslist.com.

Internet Must Do’s for Local Businesses:

• Local listings in Search engines. The 3 big search engine companies, Google Local, Microsoft’s new Bing Local listings and Yahoo Local Features, allow businesses to add their business address, phone number, hours of operation, coupons, photos and even videos.  It’s a great way to attract local customers and helps visibility immensely in local searches.  Your business can appear at the top of page one in the maps area like the following for Ashland Web Design.
• Community Review Sites.  People do like to take the advice of others when looking for online shops, but they do it just as much for local businesses. Yelp and citysearch are the 2 biggest sites out there for this, but you can even create your own by creating a local community site at Ning.com or some of the other network sites.  Looking for the perfect dentist in Ashland or a good Ashland Oregon plumber?  Searching the internet and looking to the review sites is definitely the way to go.

To find out how you can get your company to page 1 in the search engines and increase local traffic as well as online sales contact me at Bey 12 Consulting – or reach me by skype at roosterweb.

SocialMarker – Free online social bookmarking tool for submitting to most of the major sites, currently 49.  If you use the toolbar add in link then when you on on a page that you would like to submit, you click on it and it automatically fills the information but you’ll want to make sure it’s all correct.  It allows you to select the social bookmarking sites you want to submit to –
All, Best sites, None, Bookmarking sites, News sites or Dofollow sites.  This is a handy feature when all you want to do is post to bookmarking sites. The process is semi-automated and very tedious, but does appear natural since it is slow. One positive thing I can say is that the interface works a lot smoother than it did last year, however some of the sites seem to still experience some error when submitting and some of the sites they have are down.   I guess if they had a script to check that for them, the site would work great – especially if you have accounts at all the sites and are logged in to them already.  All in all a nice piece of work for the price…free!

Onlywire – Doesn’t have nearly as many sites (19) as Socialmarker and it is not semi-automatic.  Once you enter all your login information for all the sites you can then add urls, meta information and tags.  The rest is automatic.  I find that I usually have to go into a lot of the sites it posts to and tweak what it automatically fills into fields incorrectly when I’m posting critical pages. Onlywire is not completely free and offers two methods of "payment".  You can use the service for free by adding a Bookmark and Share icon to each post or you can pay $24.99 a year and not have to put the icon up.  Sometimes it is not quicker if you must go to each site and verify correct listing.  I like that they offer you a free subscription and personally don’t mind the icon on my blog, but then again this blog is about internet marketing and social media marketing so it’s likely that I will keep trying sites like these and experimenting.

SocialPoster -The 79 sites to submit to are impressive and I like that you can submit to All, None,Top, Dofollow (for SEO), News, Bookmarks, Twitters, Multy, Entertainment, Soft/Webmasters or Pligg based sites.  It seems to use the same or a similar interface that SocialMarker does, but is a little more robust.  You also can drag the icon to your favorites/bookmarks to submit a page that you are on like socialmarker allows.  Submission is done semi-automatically through a frame which I prefer or it will post a list that allows you to clik on each site which then opens in a new window.  It moves a lot quicker if you have accounts at all the sites and have either saved login info to your browser or have it handy.

PostToaster -Comes in with 72 sites to post to and has a single page posting interface and allows 4 multiple  variations of title and description tags which it will randomly send for each semi-automated post. All links are opened in a new tab with a not so easy shift T right mouse click/select open new tab which often doesn’t work quite as planned. It also allows various kinds of sites to be selected, but doesn’t seem to automatically enter the content directly into the sites sometimes which along with the clunky key/mouse/open combo makes for tedious and long winded sessions and are drawbacks.One positive feature is taht some of the sites they feature are unavailable on the other submission sites like china’s haohaoreport.com.