I have long preached about the power of what I call geographical long tail keywords.

When you are setting up your web pages for your home staging business or any other locally based business for that matter, you want your page text and the invisible meta tags behind your page to include the key geographical keyword terms appropriate for your market.

This helps the search engine know that your site is and should be shown to people in your area, and will help get your web page to the top of the search engine results for people doing a search in your community.

In smaller markets this alone, when done properly will get you to the first page of results.  However, in most markets you need to go beyond this.

You need to generate backlinks to your site.

One of my favorite ways to do so is through article writing.  I encourage you to create short meaningful articles and post them to article directories. Perhaps the most important of which is www.ezinearticles.com

I recently checked them for articles on Homestaging and noted several that included geographical references in their titles.  There’s something good and bad to be said about that idea.

The good first. Article Directories like ezinearticles have high page ranks on their own. An article that includes your town name and home staging in it may well show up on the search engines by itself.

Being a published author online in a Google Search will certainly aid in your perceived credibility in the eyes of the reader, which is certainly good.

The downside is that far fewer newsletter, blog or ezine editors are likely to use the article.  For example in the article below the author lists 5 ways to homestage PEI (Prince Edward Island) real estate.  Since it mentions PEI, its not likely a California or Florida or Australian site on homestaging or realestate is likely to repost it.

People who reprint articles from these directories are not allowed to edit them, and thus most will just pass them by.  I will be the exception as I include it below.

It’s important to understand that the widespread reposting is the primary goal of article marketing.  For each republishing of your article counts in your total backlink tally.  The reason to write articles is to gain this backlink power to raise your ranking on the search engines.  And that would be my focus, so I would tend to say do not put geopraphy in your article titles.

That said, if you have a number of good articles written, it may be worth an experiment to see if you can’t get some of them ranked.

Now what I like about the article below is that the author did create anchor text linking his site to the term PEI real estate.  This will help him rank higher in anyone’s search for that term.

Here’s his article.

5 Ways to Homestage Your PEI Real Estate For Best Sales Opportunities

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Robert_K_Parker

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PS: I am still willing to assess your home staging websites SEO status and give you hints on what to do about it.  This involves examining your websites meta tags and on page aspects plus a 20 minute or so consultation.  For the balance of July, I will do this at a discounted rate of $49.  Email me at enetwal@gmail.com for more info.

Technorati Tags: article marketing, backlinks, geographical keywords, long tail keywords, curb appeal, clutter free, seo, search engine ranking

Over the past few weeks I have posted several articles on this blog that I got directly from ezinearticles.com.  You can do the same thing.  It’s easy and it’s free.

Just go to www.ezinearticles.com and look for the article search tool in the left column.  For this blog, I just type in Home Staging and I usually can find a half dozen new article every week or so to consider adding to this blog. You can do the same thing for almost any niche market.

When doing so, there is one hard and fast rule that you must follow. You need to use the entire article as written, including the author’s resource box at the end.

Now sometimes I will add my own content before or after the article to explain why I used the article or to comment on the issues it raises, but this is optional. As long as you include their entire content, you are fine.

The author of the article gets several benefits from the process.  In fact if you go back in this blog, I have written extensively on why you should write articles of your own to achieve these same benefits, to wit..

They are more likely to be perceived as an expert in their field.  People who see the article may want to learn more and will follow the link in the resource box back to their site.  More importantly in many cases, is that the little bots the search engines like Google and Yahoo will follow these links, even if no once else does and record it as a back link.

Back links help raise your sites relative ranking in the search engines. And the higher your page shows up in a Google search in your market, the more likely your site will get seen, and in turn the more likely you will get new business.

Now by promoting someone else’s article from another marketplace 100′s or thousands of miles away will not interfere with your own local rankings, so there is no reason not to help them and yourself by posting their article.

You get to add worthwhile content to your blog with minimal effort. And the regular addition of content is a major component to successful blogging. Your readers get worthwhile content consistent with your overall topic and are thus more likely to continue to monitor and read you other offerings.

Some blogs are all borrowed content, but I prefer to write my own material and intersperse articles from article directories as a supplement. But the mix of original and “borrowed” content is up to you.

There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of article directories online that you can find article on. I’ve personally had best success with ezinearticles, but if you want to search for others just type in a good keyword for your industry and then add the word article directories and you will find many more.

One last tidbit. If you are interested in learning how to monetize your blogging efforts, so that they become a profit center on their own, you may want to get a copy of my blogging mentors new eBook called Profitable Blog Steps.   I write a bit about it in another blog of mine called A Profitable Blog

Technorati Tags: ezine articles, resource box, backlinks, succesful blogging, article directories, monetize your blog, profitable blog steps, a profitable blog

Technorati Tags: a profitable blog, article directories, backlinks, eZine Articles, monetize your blog, profitable blog steps, resource box, succesful blogging

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Kristina_Mosloski

Technorati Tags: Home Staging, Picking a Stager, Realtor, Staged Homes, Kristina Mosloski

Technorati Tags: Home Staging, Kristina Mosloski, Picking a Stager, Realtor, Staged Homes

When you repost a blog post or active rain post on an article directory like www.ezinearticles.com you are allowed to attach a resource box to the bottom of your article. Anyone can republish your article for free if they agree to include your resource box.

When preparing your resource box, you are generally allowed two links that you can direct as you choose. It’s important to use anchor text for these links based on the keyword you want your destination site(s) to rank for.

Particularly if your goal is to build your search engine standing as well as generate traffic.

Anchor text is simple html code that creates a hyper link to the web site you want people to go, while displaying your anchor text. Your anchor text should be the keyword you want your site to rank for.

One of my newest clients is a home stager in Tampa Florida. The keyword she wants to rank high on for her business is “Home Staging” and “Tampa” or “Home staging in Tampa”

So to maximize the value of her resource box I advised her to use the following statement:

Ann Alderson is an expert at <* href=”http://stagingsouthtampa.com”>Home Staging in the South Tampa region. You can get more information on home staging on her blog about <* href=”http://blog.stagingsouthtampa.com”> house staging tips.

[Insert a letter "a" where the * are to appear as

When placed in html code it reads as follows: Ann Alderson is an expert at Home Staging in the South Tampa region. You can get more information on home staging on her blog about house staging tips.

In this case, we used the second anchor text to use an alternate keyword, “house staging” and sent traffic to her blog. This creates a back link to an internal part of her site which improves its standing in Google’s eyes. Google likes links to internal pages as it shows there is interest in more than the front page of the site.

As we’ve discussed before, the three main reasons to do article marketing is to establish yourself as an expert in your field, drive traffic to your site and build back links to raise your standing in the search engines.

In Ann’s case, the articles may help establish her credentials and even send a few people from Tampa to her web site. But most people who see her articles will be far from her marketplace.

More important to her is the knowledge that the Google bots and other search bots will find her site and rank it for the keywords she wants her site known for: home staging and house staging and Tampa.

Most of her competitors are not doing this, and as a result in the relatively near term, she should rise from her current relative obscurity in a highly competitive local market to the first page of the listings. In time with additional articles and other postings she may even win the coveted top spot.

That is the power of Article Marketing and the proper use of anchor text and keywords in your resource box.

Our recent series that started out as an investigation into how to get your business web site to the top of the local search engine rankings has brought us to the topic of article marketing.

This is an important topic on its own. So much so that I have started a new web site dedicated to the topic called Article Marketing Hints.

Actually the web site is http://ArticleMarketingHint.com because someone beat me to the punch and grabbed the url with the extra s on the end.

My most recent post there discusses 6 tips for writing better articles. I encourage you to stop on over and read the article.  I will continue to develop that site with more and more articles on article writing.

Note that I created two back links above. One as anchor text and the other as a straight url, so you would know how to get to the site. I used the plural in the anchor text as I want to be found when people use both the singular and the plural forms.

When you go to the site you will see an eBook for sale in the right sidebar.  If you were to look at the offer by clicking on the image of the book, you will discover that I am offering a bonus video series with the book. This series offers some excellent tips on how to write effective articles in an easy to follow video format.

It’s very well done and useful for newbie and intermediate article marketers.  I know I learned a trick or two.

The ebook is written by Mike Steup.  Mike is one of the young up and comers in the internet marketing arena. He shares a number of insights that will certainly help you get going on the right track as you begin to promote your business with internet marketing.

Technorati Tags: anchor text, Article Marketing Hints, ArticleMarketingHint, back links

Internet Article Marketing

Distilling Fine Articles from the

Fruits of Your Mind

You have decided to use the power of internet article marketing to draw eyes and back links to your web site. Good idea. Article marketing can be a very effective tool to accomplish both objectives. But where do you start?

Good Question.

Just as a distillery needs to first gather grapes and then run them though a series of steps before turning them into a fine brandy, you must first gather your ideas, before you write your article.

Before you begin

Whether you are brewing a single article or a series of them, the prerequisite is deciding what your topic is, and understanding why you are writing.

Your writing will enjoy greater clarity of purpose when each article has a clear singular keyword or phrase. Whether writing one or multiple articles it’s best to identify each of your keyword phrases in advance before you begin. They will help you form your thoughts, and may encourage you to explore nuances you may have otherwise ignored.

When writing an internet marketing article, your objective is to get eyes and or back links to your site. To do that, you need to get accepted into an internet article directory and then get noticed and republished by ezine editors before you’ll get read by end users. That’s a lot of different audiences. While you know what’s in it for you, begin the writing process thinking about what’s in it for your ultimate reader as well.

Now that you are clear on your topic and why you are writing, you are ready to begin the next phase.

Brainstorming

As you mull over your keyword and topic, ideas will come to you. That’s the main benefit of the prior exercise. Once your conscious mind is clear on the task at hand, so too is the subconscious. It will send you flashes of brilliance that may surprise you.

You want to capture those ideas. Even the bad ones, but search out the brilliant ones. Bad ideas can morph into good ones. Don’t judge, record. Write them down. Use whatever system that works for you. Long hand, computer, voice recorder, whatever.

Think about possible titles. What would grab people’s attention? Remind yourself of your readers. Who are they? Why would they want to read your article? What do they want to know?

What is the essential one element of your article? If it had to be just one sentence, what would it be? What are the key facts you want to share? Write them down, or list where you will look them up.

What will your call to action be? What do you want them to actually do when they are done reading your article? How are you going to get them to do it? What are you going to tell them that will make a difference in their lives?

This process can take days or 30 minutes. The results will vary by the amount of time you can devote. If you can, daydream about your topic while driving or doing other work. Your subconscious can be a powerful tool. What every time you have, use it to enlarge your topic.

In the next step, you are going to tie it down and begin to do some pruning.

The Outline.

We’ve all been taught the writing outline format since grade school. They are easy. You already know the main parts to your article. It will have a title, an introduction, a body and a close. And in the case of internet article marketing it will also have a resource box.

See, you are half done already. While it may vary, let’s assume there are three main points to the body.

• Title
• Introduction
• Body
o A
o B
o C
• Close
• Resource Box

Review your brainstorming notes. Pick the three most important ideas that must be in the body. If you have more that three, which can be grouped together?

If you absolutely cannot fit everything into three groups, add or subtract. It’s your article. By trying to nestle ideas into groups, you define the essence of your article.

You then assign an order within and among the groups in your outline. Once that’s done, you’re done with the outline. You can always add more, but at this point, you have captured and ordered the essence of your thoughts. If this were a book, rather than an article you would perhaps need to get more detailed. But it’s not, so it’s time to write that first draft.

Technorati Tags: Article Marketing, Article writing, back links, outlines, SEO

Do Your Internet Marketing Articles Meet this 5 Question Test?

If you ignore the five essentials to effective internet marketing article writing, you may as well not waste your time. Article writing is a powerful tool. When done well, it will attract a lot of eyes and back links to your web site. Do it poorly, and your results will be meager.

1. Does your title attract the right reader’s attention?

Ideally, it should let the “right” readers know the information in the article is for them, and it should intrigue them to at least take a look. The goal of a headline or title is to get the reader to read the first line. If they don’t, your article fails its purpose.

Specifically, you want to catch your ideal prospects attention. A too cute title may catch a lot of attention, but if the people attracted aren’t candidates for what you are selling, in the final analysis you are just wasting their time. So while you want to be provocative, focus on that which would be appropriate for your specific audience.

Once you have them reading your first line, make sure it’s powerful enough to carry them into the first whole paragraph and beyond.

2. Is your article properly focused?

A good internet marketing article is succinctly focused on one topic. That topic may have multiple parts, but they are all specifically tied to one idea. As internet marketers, that idea should be a single Keyword or Keyword Phrase.

People will search for articles in article directories by keyword, and so you want them to be able to find your article. When they publish your article, you want to get back links to your web site based on that keyword. Thus it is imperative that you decide specifically which keyword you are trying to rank for, before you write the first word.

It goes without saying that the keyword and the article should be directly related to the site you are referring people to, or again you would be wasting everyone’s time.

3. Have you effectively used your keywords?

If possible you should include your keyword in your title. This will resonate with people who are searching for articles on your keyword. But don’t force it. Your primary objective is to get people to read your article. Including the keyword is a distinct plus, but not mandatory.

You want to use the keywords as often as possible within the article, but again don’t overdo it. Too many internet marketing articles are overstuffed with the keywords to the point that they don’t read well. So rather than trying to meet some artificial keyword density, concentrate on writing a readable article but do try to use your keywords wherever appropriate.

4. Is your content worth reading?

Provide your readers with value. If an internet marketing article is to get picked up and republished elsewhere, it will be because it caught an editor’s eye and delivered content worth sharing with their readers.

People respond well to facts, figures and statistics as long as they are not overwhelming. Anecdotes and stories that make a point enliven articles. Rather than adding a lot of adjectives to an article, focus on your verbs. Active verbs and a positive message are always welcome.

5. Does your resource box deliver?

The goal of an internet marketing article is to drive people and robots to your website. Your resource box is therefore critical to the success of your article. If you are not allowed to include anchor text in the article itself, it is essential that you do so in the resource box. Repeat your keyword and link it to your target site. But do so creatively.

As much as possible, develop your resource box as a continuation of your article. If it flows as thought it were a continuation of the article above it, a larger portion of your readers will read it as well. And then be sure to include a call to action. Let your readers know what step you want them to take.

If you have been able to hold their attention from start to finish of the article, it is only logical that they will want to follow on to the next step, by visiting your web site, blog or take whatever additional step you desire.

If you write your internet marketing articles with these five questions in mind, you will be rewarded with lots of traffic and back links to your web sites.

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[Below is a sample of a resource box I will be testing when I post this article on the article directories.]

To learn more ideas and tips on how to ensure your internet marketing articles grab tons of new traffic and backlinks to your sites go to http://ArticleMarketingHint.com. The author Earl Netwal also publishes a blog for small business people called http://MicroBusinessSpecialist.com/blog

Technorati Tags: Article Marketing, back links, internet marketing articles, resource box, traffic

Article Marketing – Four Wins in a Row

Article Marketing as it has evolved on the internet is a classic win-win-win-win institution that has become one of the backbones of the internet. There are four essential players in the article marketing game, all of whom benefit, each in their own way.

Like any market, article marketing is a business of supply and demand. There are end users, who get material from their local vendor who in turn gets material from their wholesaler, who in turns gets material from individual producers.

Unlike most markets, the transfer of goods in the article marketing arena is largely free. The end user wants free access to information. The magic of the article marketing model is that it has created economic incentives to all the parties to meet that demand.

There are many places online for people to get information. These include static web sites, blogs, forums, ezines, ebooks, etc. The producers of these sites, blogs etc are frequently monetizing their efforts with products and services they sell directly or on behalf of others or by various forms of advertising revenue.

Several of these, blogs and ezines in particular require a constant source of new material to keep their site fresh and to attract information seekers with the expectation that a certain percentage of them will also take a revenue producing action. The challenge for these venues is coming up with new material on a regular basis.

Their options are to write it themselves, hire it out or find a free resource of relevance to their specific niche of readers.

Article Directories

Article Directories have emerged to fill that role. They are the wholesalers of articles across a vast array of topics and specialties. They recruit article submissions from individual writers and group them in easy to search categories for the blog writer to search.

Most offer this service free of charge to the blog writers and anyone else who just wants to research a given topic. They make their money the same way most of the blog and ezine writers do. They usually have Google Adsense ads on their site as well as other advertising. They sometimes offer additional premium services for article writers and users as well, but these vary widely.

To be successful, article directories have found it necessary to be editors. They want their customers on both ends to benefit from the equation. To assure this they develop specific rules for the type of material they host on their site and editorial guidelines. These vary by individual article directory. Article writers must meet these standards to be accepted into the directory. This in turn assures a quality product for the blogger and their readers.

One of the most frequent editorial restraints is to contain blatant advertising. Most article directories have strict rules that prohibit advertising except in a section added to the end of the article called the Resource Box.

So who produces all this free editorially up to snuff material? What’s in it for them?

There are three primary motivators for the authors. Some are born writers who just need to write to express themselves. Or perhaps they are motivated to establish themselves as an expert in a given arena or niche.

Another major group are individual business people who seek to inform prospective customers about their product or service. In some cases they may share the desire to brand themselves as experts.

The motivation for most businesses lies in the utilization of the resource box. Most article directories allow authors to include two or more hyperlinks in this appendix to their article. These offer two major benefits to the submitting business. They can send people to your web site, called “traffic” in internet circles. They can also serve as back links to a specific page on their web site. These back links are helpful in getting attention from search engines and serve to help increase the targeted web sites ranking

As articles get picked up more and more bloggers and ezines these back links appear in more and more places increasing the relevance of the site in the eyes of the search engines. They are in some sense votes for the targeted web sites.

As importantly for many businesses is the traffic they bring as more and more people read the articles and go to the sites where a certain percentage will buy products or take other desired actions.

This entire arrangement is interdependent on each of the elements. The fact that is has evolved as an essentially free service for the most part is one of the marvels of the internet. The end user gets information, the blogger gets readers, the article directory traffic that they convert to revenue through ads, and the authors who get recognitions, traffic and search engine ranking. A win-win-win-win situation.

Technorati Tags: anchor text, article directories, backlinks, resource box

How to get to the top of the Search Engines, XIII

So far in this sequence I have stressed the need to get your on site ducks in a row if you want your web site to appear at the top of the search engine rankings. This is a critical first step that most people never get around to. Have you? If not, I still offer my Wart Services to analyze your site. Then make the changes. They matter.

The second part of my sequence has been focused on back links and how to get them. We’ve talked about anchor text, and several social networking sites you can use to build backlinks to your site. The advantage of these sites is your own ability to custom create your own backlinks. This give you control over the actual keywords used in the anchor text and where they link on your site. This latter control allows you to direct links to internal pages, which bolsters your standing in the eyes of the Search Engines.

Article Marketing

Today, we start a series on the most important way to build links and traffic to your web site, article marketing.

I will explain how it works tomorrow, and then in subsequent posts explain the four things all articles must have, how to create an outline for your articles, easy ways to get you creative juices flowing, what to do before submitting to article directories, and some red hot tips on how to get your articles read, and perhaps most importantly, how to write a resource box that makes people click. I may even offer suggestions on what to do if you hate to write.

Article writing requires a bit of work and it’s like slow feed fertilizer. The results of article marketing take time to build. The plus of article marketing is that it does ultimately flourish and will generate an exponential growth in the number of back links to your site. And as we have demonstrated, backlinks matter.  They matter even more when they are coming from a wide variety of places and grow over time.

The essential mathematics of article marketing comes from posting a single article with an article directory service.  Once it is accepted there, you have a back link to your site from a generally high ranking resource. But even better, as first a couple and then many more people find your article and post it on their blogs, newsletters etc, you start getting back links from many different places. So instead of having one back link, you may now have six or sixty.

There are thousands of article directories, some of which are very large. You can post the same article to more than one directory, multiplying again the number of potential backlinks you can create for your self with one half hour of writing. Since these articles stay on the directories indefinitely, it’s possible that an article you write today could be published off and on over the next five or ten years.

A disciplined approach of writing an article a day or even an article a week can over a period of a year or two lead to thousands and tens of thousands of backlinks. That level of backlinks could put most people on the top of their respective niche even in highly competitive niches. And put them there to stay.

The best part of article writing is that it is essentially a free way of building your standings.  Although as we will learn, there are some worthwhile paid services that can be real time savers.

One last tidbit for today. You don’t need to be a great writer to effectively use article marketing. So if the thought of writing scares you, don’t despair. The power of article writing is too significant to allow your lack of skills or fears to get in the way. We will discuss some options that will allow you to be successful without writing a single word.

Technorati Tags: anchor tags, Article Marketing, backlinks, WART Analysis