When we spend our money on article marketing, we concentrate on two things: 1) Cleverly enticing the readers of our brilliant prose to visit our business’s website; 2) doing a bit of search engine optimization for the page on our website to which we link.  We naturally want to get the most for our money that we spend on article writing and distribution.  Particularly when we outsource to a betterweb writing service, we want to make sure that we do more than merely recover our investment.  That hope is understandable, but is it wise in the long term?

Sometimes our enthusiasm for generating external links to our website’s pages and our hopes that our readers will take the bait and click through to our site gets in the way of a rather important detail.  For our articles to be truly effective, they need to be found by readers and considered worthy by the search engine algorithms.

Face facts, our new article isn’t the only one being posted on EzineArticles or GoArticles on any given day.  Indeed, it probably isn’t even the only article being posted that day that deals with our topic, although nobody has written as cleverly as we have of course.  So how do we insure that our article rises to the attention of the readership above all of that clearly inferior competition?

Yeah, I know the standard writing and submission tips:

*  Use a descriptive title and, if possible, make it “catchy.”
*  Tag the article with keywords that are popular and that are actually used in the article.
*  If the article directory offers and opportunity to provide your own synopsis (as does EzineArticles), spend the time to write in well and make it inviting.

All of those tips are important; none should be ignored.  What we really need, though, is for the search engines to give our articles some much deserved respect.  After all, most of our potential readers will find our article by means of a search engine.  Only then can they be emotionally moved by our prose.  Only then will they follow the link to our site.  Only then will they repeated buy our product and service.  Only then will we become as wealthy as King Midas as we sit around in our pajamas, working from home only fifteen minutes a day.  Okay, I got carried away a bit by the marketing hype.  I offer you my sincere regrets for getting carried away.

How do we really earn respect from the search engines for our articles?  External links.  Lots and lots of external links.  How do we get those wonderful external links?  Well, we either sit back and wait for them to magically appear, or…

We have to actively assign a part of our article marketing plan to building links for our articles, themselves.  Granted that will reduce the number of links we have the time to provide for our business’s site, but the trade is that linking to our articles that do lead to our site become more powerful.

You can settle on your own ratio, but most of us should probably assign about 20% to 35% of our article marketing content to providing external links directly to our previously published articles.  For example, every once in a while, submit content to A1Articles that contains links to some of your content on EzineArticles and EverydayArticles.  Use an EzineArticles article to link directly to a master work that have have posted to ArticleVista. 

If this sounds as if it might complicate your record keeping and your approach to writing, you’re right!  Consequently, many Internet marketers outsource all of this to a well trained company that really understands writing, submissions, keywords and search engine optimization.  That outsourcing approach leave us plenty of time to sit around home in our pajamas counting our money.