Article marketing has been around for ages. Many have been using it to drive traffic to their websites and gain quality links back. Any SEO book that you read is going to tell you there is some value to writing articles for EzineArticles or some other article directories. But not many people know how to use article directories to build links properly. It’s one thing to write magnetic content and go for the traffic. It’s another thing to get some juice for relevant keywords to your business. I personally prefer to go for both. It’s not enough to just get traffic from article directories. You want to get highly optimized anchor texts in the process. And it would help if you could write content that others would want to use on their websites.

In order to succeed with article marketing, you need to focus on three things:

• Value: you want to provide some value to your readers and make them want to comeback to your website for more. It’s one thing to submit junk to article directories. It’s another thing to make people appreciate the time you have put to write articles for them.
• Keywords: you want to target the right keywords to not only drive targeted traffic to your website, but also get ranked high for your core keywords. Keep in mind that when people decide to publish your articles, they are obliged to use your anchor text. So don’t go for something general.
• ROI: writing articles takes time. Your goal is to justify the time you spend on articles by getting the most out of your traffic. One way to save time is by using an article submission software. Some article directories (e.g. Isnare) charge a small fee to do this job. Either way, these services help you submit your articles to hundreds of article directories. Another way to increase your ROI is by avoiding the duplicate content penalty. You can do that by writing multiple version of your articles and submit them to top article directories.

Article marketing does work. But you need to do it right to get the best value out of it. You need:

• The Right Keywords: keywords in your article title can determine how you are ranked by search engines. Don’t drop the ball here.
• The Right Content: you need magnetic content to have any chance of getting anything back from article directories. Put your best foot forward.
• The Right Resource Box: this is the most important part of your article. Make sure you link to your website and provide your whole link in your resource box. And don’t forget to have multiple versions handy to get the most value out of your articles.

Article marketing can be tough. It takes time, and sometimes it takes patience to see any real results. But if you keep plugging away, you are going to build up your traffic and ranking slowly. If you don’t mind working super hard, Article Marketing can be a very lucrative tactic.

Your take: do you use a submission software to submit your articles to directories?

The new Wordze is here! If you are not familiar with Wordze, it’s one of the toughest rivals WordTracker has ever had. These guys have been going back and forth in the past. But with the latest major update to Wordze, it’s not too hard to make a good argument on why you should be using Wordze. Not only the interface has improved dramatically, Wordze comes with a few features not seen in any other keyword research package. And it does help that they don’t charge a fortune for it. With that in mind, let’s see what the new Wordze has to offer.

The new Wordze interface comes with all kinds of options. But in reality, you should only concern yourself with the three menus:

• Research & Ideas
• Projects
• Services

Research Ideas:

Research and Ideas is where you get the meat of this service. As you can see in the above image, the R&I section, allows you to do your keyword research, dig up ideas, generate typos, and even come up with synonyms and other version of your keyword. The history option is very similar to what you see with Google trends, but of course it’s designed for keyword junkies, and it provides you with all kinds of information that you can’t easily get with Google trends.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is why most folks purchase Wordze. That’s the main purpose of this tool (just like WordTracker). Here you get a chance to filter your results to remove dubious entries such as adult, drug-related, or gambling keywords. I was very impressed with the speed that you get your results. It’s almost instantaneous. With some other keyword tools, you have to wait 30 seconds to 1 minute. So, it was great to see a keyword tool that values my time.

Once you run the research, you are going to get count, estimated 30-day traffic, KEI, and access to further analyis tools on Wordze.

This is usually where you will have to start. You can then use history, wordrank, and dig to do further analysis to figure out how hard it is to get ranked for each of your keywords and how you can expand your keyword list.

History (Trend):

The history tool is very valuable. I know WordTracker has worked its own version of trends, but Wordze is just superior in this area. Here is what I got for the term “credit cards:”

Sounds pretty straight forward right? Wait till you see the other information that you can get from this tool:

You not only get daily changes, but also traffic growth over the past 30 days for your keywords. You aslo can figure out what markets provide you with the best opportunity to succeed. I don’t know about you, but I can spend years playing with this tool.

WordRank:

WordRank is one of my favorite features on Wordze. It’s an amazing tool that analysis your market for you (based on your keyword) and let’s you know how hard it is to get ranked for a keyword. Wordze’s WordRank technology crawls the top search engines, checks back links, finds authority sites, and shows you PageRank, InTitle, and InUrl data. You can then compare your WordRank Index with KEI and R/S ratio. Here is what you get with WordRack:

What I love about this tool is the fact that it provides you with information on demographics as well. I am not just talking about breakdown by country. You get your breakdown by city as well!

Dig:

The Dig tool on Wordze is very similar to its counterpart on WordTracker, but it’s much easier to use, and it’s almost fully automated. All you do is provide the system with a keyword. You set it and forget it. You can download your report in excel when it’s ready. It’s one of the best ways to expand your keyword list.

Thesaurus:

This tool is designed specifically for folks obsessed with everything LSI. The tool may look simple on the surface, but it provides you with valuable keyword variations that you can use to further optimize your pages. Here are the options you have here:

• Related keywords: similar to the LSI keyword tool offered by Google.
• Synonyms: provides you with a list of keywords that are synonymous with your keyword phrase
• Coordinated keywords: similar to the first option, but it is much broader. Great tool to expand your keyword list and come up with cross-selling opportunities.
• Like keywords: another great option that helps you expand your keyword set.

Typo Generator:

The typo generator is another great feature that helps you target even more keywords. The good thing about this tool is that it gives you phrases and not just single words. Here is what I found for the term “credit cards:”

Some of these terms are being searched for a lot, so you’d be doing yourself a disservice by not targeting them. (more…)

If you ask a SEO expert how you can go about ranking high for a highly competitive keyword, they would tell you all the link building and other techniques that you should try to give yourself a chance. But what most folks still underestimate these days is the power of video. Videos can not only drive lots of traffic to your website, they are getting ranked well on Google as well. It means you can get ranked high for a highly competitive keyword not only with your articles but also with your videos.

Let’s take the word “social media.” If you can get ranked high for that word, who knows what you can do with all that traffic. And let’s not forget that if you are a social media consultant, and you are trying to build some credibility, what a better way to 1. create magnetic videos and 2. be ranked high on Google for this keyword.

Getting ranked on Google with your articles may be tougher than before, but the video market is still growing. That means as long as you get your tagging right and submit your videos to the right websites, you are more than likely to get ranked high. Creating videos is not everything you need to do to create a fully-fledged hardcore SEO campaign, but it’s a good start.

Latent Semantic Indexing has been around for a while now. Many SEO consultants throw the phrase “LSI” around to impress their clients. After all, who wouldn’t be impressed by a 3 letter acronym that most people know nothing about. LSI is a system that helps search engines figure out how relevant your pages are based on the set of keywords that you are using on each and every page. You can easily find your LSI keywords by using Google Adwords tools. If you have used Google Adwords Keyword tool before, you have probably seen the “related keyword” option. By using those keywords, you help search engines find out exactly what your page is about.

You can optimize your pages by adding LSI keywords to them. But how do you find out what keywords work the best. Not all LSI keywords are created the same. You can always guess. But the better way is to monitor what pages are currently getting ranked high on search engines, and what LSI combinations are used on those pages.

Keyword LSI Spy is a cool keyword tool that takes the guessing game out of your LSI strategy. Keyword LSI Spy 2 goes through top pages in your niche and finds out the keywords that are being used to dominate the search engines. You also get the standard feature that you would get with any other keyword tool:

• The page’s wordcount
• URL Analysis
• Tag analysis
• Link analysis (internal/external)
• Character analysis
• Keyword analysis
• Keyword density

The LSI concept is not that hard to understand, but it’d be too time consuming if you do everything by hand. That’s why I prefer to outsource some of the process by using tools such as KLS 2.0. I know a lot of SEO purists rather do everything by hand, but there are better ways to spend your time.

Google is the big bad guerrilla in the search marketing industry. It has literally dominated most aspects of this market. For years, people have warned about Google’s obsession with world domination. It seems the latest revelation about Google’s behavioral targeting endeavours has just opened a few more eyes. Google’s success has been due to its uncanny ability to deal with raw data. Whether it is the search engine or Google Adsense ads, Google does its best by analyzing data to provide better service to its users.

I happen to agree with Sir Tim Berners-Lee that the future of the web is at stake here. The fact that companies such as Google find it acceptable to monitor their users to find out their online behaviors is very disturbing. Conspiracy theorists have claimed for years that the Internet will become the ultimate tracking tool for the government and the powers-that-be. Think about it. If you are being monitored constantly online, there is nothing these companies don’t know about you. Would you watch that controversial video if you knew you were being monitored?

I’d like to think that our elected officials respect the privacy of their constituents. The problem is there is a lot of money involved in this field, and there are very powerful forces at work here. It’d be encouraging to see some laws passed on this very issue, but powerful companies always find a way to get around the laws and bend them. I don’t want to be too paranoid here. My suggestion here is that you should go anonymous if you are visiting sites that you don’t want others to know you are surfing. If you are checking Yahoo! sports or just reading TechCrunch, you’ll be fine.

Your take: should companies have the right to track your behavior?

Search engine rankings is one of the most overrated factors when it comes to evaluating the success of a SEO project.  A lot of people want to get ranked No. 1 for every single keyword under the sun. In reality, that is not possible unless you are in a very obscure market. If you are in the financial industry, you are going to have to go ahead with thousands of competitors, and while you may get top rankings on a lot of your keywords with the right campaign, it is more likely that you won’t be able to dominate these hyper-competitive markets.

Unfortunately, many businesses treat the No. 1 position on top engines as a right. Everybody thinks that they have the best website in the world, and they “deserve” to be number 1. I won’t argue with you about whether you have a point there. But reaching the top 10 positions on search engines such as Google is more of a privilege, and it requires hard work and persistence. And you can’t just lock in top positions. I have seen so many businesses which invest in SEO only to cut it all off once they have reached their ranking goals. In reality, you are not going to stay in your top positions unless you continue to beat your competitors in the field of organic search. If you stop optimizing, those folks will pass you by.

Most businesses know that your rankings don’t change every hour, but that hasn’t kept them from checking theirs every single hour. Call it whatever you like, but ranking obsession is not healthy. Instead of constantly worrying about where you are on search engines, you should focus more on what others are doing right that you should be doing for your website as well. Being a ranking junkie hasn’t made anyone a SEO superstar.

If you are only doing business in the U.S., you have probably not dealt with this issue. But, for businesses that conduct business on an international level, this is a big issue. Let’s say you own a financial site and want it to get ranked on Google.fr as well as it does on Google.com. What should you do? It’s not that simple. I have seen authority sites smashing through all barriers with their aggressive link building campaigns and lack of competition in international markets. But if your market is highly competitive abroad, you may have to do more than just building links.

Getting ranked on International search engines doesn’t need to be hard. With Google, it’s easy to guess what’s important and what’s not. Here is how you should go about getting ranked on international engines:

• Geo-target your website: Google Webmasters tools enables you to geo-target your site. This won’t be the only thing you need to do, but it helps.
• META Information: META tags won’t help you get ranked higher but they still help. If you are trying to get ranked for credit cards in France, add geo-keywords to your META keywords and description (e.g. France Credit cards).
• Domains: treat your international business as a separate entity. You may be able to getaway with a .com domain for markets that speak English, but it’s always better to register international domains for different markets (e.g. CreditCard.fr).
• IP: if your host is located in the U.S, and you are trying to get ranked higher on Google.FR, you should consider moving your host local. If your host is an international business as well, you can ask them to give you a local IP.
• Google Maps: register your business on Google by taking advantage of Google Local Business Center.
• Links: the more links you get the better, right? Not necessarily. You want to make sure you get links from local sites (e.g. French financial sites) to help search engines figure out the nature of your website and your target locations.
• Local Info: if you have an office in a foreign country, make sure you include your address information on your website. That helps Google figure your site out better.
• Language: it’s OK to have an English site that targets British folks. But French folks will probably have trouble understanding your English website. So if you want to get ranked higher on Google FR, write your content in french or use a translator to do it for you.

There you have it. If you follow the above steps, you should be OK with international engines. It’s not really that different from what we do for the U.S. market. It just looks more complicated.

With the cost of pay per click marketing starting to go through the roof in most markets, many marketers are turning to search engine optimization to drive traffic to their websites and reduce their costs. But there is so much you can do by optimizing your on-page SEO factors. Sure, it’s great to have a decent title tag. It’s a must to have your keywords in your H tags. But these are not going to get you to the top of the search engines in a highly competitive market. The more competitive a market gets, the more creative you got to be to build links and drive traffic to your website.

Web Traffic Machines is a unique set of SEO tools and guides that helps you go beyond what you read in books and find creative ways to push your site up the rankings. Now, before I go on and claim how great this package is, you’ve got to understand that it is different from most SEO packages available online. These techniques are not blackhat but rather creative. There is no chance of you getting banned for these tools, so rest assured you are NOT risking your site’s standing on Google by using these tools. So let’s see what you get with Web Traffic Machines:

1. Tagging & Pinging: most folks know what tagging and pinging are. But not many folks know how to properly use these to drive tons of traffic to their websites. If you are one of these folks, you are going to learn the right way to use these technologies to your advantage.

2. Video SEO: video may not be as novel as it was last year, but it is one of the best ways to find your way to the top of the search engines. Don’t miss your chance to dominate the search engines. Web Traffic Machines allows you to mass post your videos to many social communities and saves you a lot of time in the process.

3. Newsgroup: if you have read any SEO books recently, there is a good chance you have not heard about the power of newsgroups in driving traffic to your website. Newsgroups may be underrated, but you shouldn’t ignore them.

4. Forums: believe it or not, forums are still one of the best ways to attract new visitors for your site and business. But which forums should you be involved in? Web Traffic Machines solves that problem for you.

5. Yahoo!: Yahoo! is the most underrated way of driving traffic to websites. Yahoo! may not be as popular as Google, but it still is a big traffic driver.

6. Banner Exchange: banner exchange is not even recognized as a SEO technique. But it’s really the glorified version of reciprocal linking. It’s very powerful and can help you push your site to the next level.

7. Directories: directories may not be as important as they used to be, but they can still drive you traffic, and you still get some link juice. Web Traffic Machines finds you directories that are relevant to your niche.

8. Blogs: Web Traffic Machines comes with a tool that allows you to find Wordpress and Drupal websites that you can get links from. Every link counts as long as you get it from relevant sites.

9. Chatbox: now this is innovative. You have probably seen sites that are using Chatboxes and Shoutboxes to communicate with their readers. With Web Traffic Machines, you can drive traffic to your website fast.

10. Images: a lot of folks laughed at me when I told them that I get more traffic from my images than from MSN alone. You can lots of traffic for your images if you play your cards right. Web Traffic Machines shows you how!

11. ICQ: ICQ has been around for years. But did you know you can drive traffic to your website from ICQ pages? I haven’t used this technique myself, but it’s on my to do list.

12. Video list building: Web Traffic Machines shows you how you can build enormous lists by taking advantage of video. This is not SEO, but it still a big traffic driver.

13. Classified SEO: the technique is pretty self-explanatory. A lot of folks use classified sites to drive traffic to their business. It’s a no brainer.

Web Traffic Machines has some great ideas for driving organic or free traffic to your website. The package is not for everyone. If you don’t know what SEO is, then you should probably start somewhere else. But if you are paying through your nose for PPC, then you should definitely give Web Traffic Machines a try. The videos included with this package walk you through the steps you need to take to optimize your site for the search engines. And the tools help you create traffic in an innovative fashion. But don’t take my word for it. Head on to Web Traffic Machines to find out for yourself.

Verdict: A-

We have heard it all before. The social media has changed the way we communicate and share information amongst ourselves. But a lot of folks ignore the link-building power of social media sites. There are literally thousands of social media sites out there, and some give you yes-follow links. I know a lot of purists encourage you to be involved in the social media and add value to get the best out of this channel. The problem is, you can’t possibly be active in all these communities. Keeping your information up to date on a handful of social media sites is one thing. Being active on 100 social media sites is another thing.

Most folks don’t even try to be active on more than 5 social media sites. That way you could put more time providing value to these communities instead of stretching yourself thin. But that doesn’t mean you should completely ignore other social media sites. You should take time (or hire someone) to submit your pages to social media sites to keep traffic coming in. You can even use social media submitters to get the job done. If you have a blog that is struggling to attract traffic, you should definitely use all social media sites to promote your content. You shouldn’t spam, but you should do your best to get the word out about your content. If you create good solid content, there is no reason you shouldn’t promote them. And you don’t have to break the bank to do it.

SEOmoz has some of the best paid tools in the SEO industry. But they also have a lot of free tools that you can take advantage of to complete your SEO work. SEOToolbox comes with lots of useful free tools that helps you find out if you are maximizing your SEO opportunity. Here is what you get with SEOToolbox:

• Strongest Pages On a Domain: find your superstar pages on your domain.
• Who Else Is Hosted on my IP?: find out how many other sites are hosted on your shared IP.
• Check Inclusion: find out whether your site is included in Google index.
• Check Backlinks: find out the number of backlinks to your URL.
• Outbound Link Checker: find out your external links on your website.
• Check PageRank: if you are a PR junkie, you’ve got to see this.
• Find Domain Age: find out when was the first time your site was spidered.
• Check HTTP Status Code: figure out if you are using 301, 302 redirects on your pages.
• Check Index Pages: find out how many of your pages are indexed in major search engines.
• Whois: find out a domain’s registration information.
• IP Location: find out where your IP is located and how that can affect your SEO rankings.

There you have it. SEOToolbox is not exactly a groundbreaking SEO toolset, but it does come with standard free tools that you get on some other websites. Overall, you get the best SEO analysis by signing up for SEOmoz PRO. But even if you don’t, you still have plenty of free tools to work with.