One of the more recent cottage industries in the search engine optimization (SEO) world is that of article marketing – using articles posted on the World Wide Web to drive traffic to your Web site.

In the previous article in this series we addressed the important steps in search engine optimizing your articles so they receive favorable positioning in Google, Yahoo and Bing. In this article we will explain why it is important to include hyperlinks to your sites, advertisements, products, etc., in your online articles.

At this point, if you have any degree of article marketing experience, you’re saying, “Well, duh!” to yourself. If you’re writing a marketing article for print, you must spell out the entire URL of a Web site that you want your readers to visit, and then hope that they are interested enough to type that entire URL in. Then you cross your fingers and hope they type it correctly. That would have been no big deal 15 years ago. Today, to some, it’s like asking them to read the entire encyclopedia – out loud. Creating a hyperlink in your text saves today’s I-want-it-this-second media consumers from overexerting themselves.

Seriously, though, a more important reason to have hyperlinks back to your sites, advertisements and products is to allow readers to see the items you are trying to promote in a single click. But THE most important reason is because it creates a very important element of the article marketing optimization realm known as a “back link.” A Web publisher or blogger creates a link to an outside site because that external site has content that the originating publisher or blogger considers interesting and-or valuable. In the algorithms contrived by search engines to rank Web sites, a key factor is the number of “back links” from external sites. According to the logic, the more external hyperlinks there are to a site, the more valuable and interesting its content is – and therefore the higher ranking it should receive.

Once you post the article you’ve written to the Internet and create the hyperlink, viola – you have one back link to Web site A. Your next task is to somehow increase the number of back links from other sites, because there are a few billion Web sites in the same boat. (Don’t try making 10,000 hyperlinks from your blog post to Web site A. It will have the same effect as a single link since they would all be from the same blog post.)

You may have heard the term “reciprocal links.” In recent years, it was common practice for webmasters to work with each other to try to maximize their back links through reciprocal linking agreements. (“If you’ll link to my site, I’ll link to yours.”) But the process was very time-consuming. Automated article marketing services have replaced reciprocal linking these days. We recommend Article Marketing Automation. Once you join, you post your articles, create your links, “spin” some text (explained on that site), and your article is sent out to a network of blogs. Over time, your article is automatically posted on more and more blogs, meaning more and more back links are created in a gradual fashion. The blogosphere is your article marketing tool, because you can opt to have no limit on the number of blogs to which your article is syndicated! Within a month of joining, more than 2,000 copies of our articles had been automatically posted on other people’s blogs.

Bookmark this page so you can check back frequently for more articles in this ongoing series.