I was talking to a friend this past weekend, and in my discussion with him about his efforts to market his website, I realized that he had a completely upside down idea of exactly what he was supposed to be going for when trying to drive traffic to his website.
He had thought that the idea was to make results turn up in Google when someone did a search for his name.
This is actually not the case, although a side effect of having a well marketed site can be that your name has search results that are actually about you. But that is not the main goal when you’re marketing your site.
Think about it this way–who would be typing your name into Google?
Someone who already knows who you are. Maybe they met you at a party or a networking event. If a person already knows your name and has your business card, they very likely know what your website address is and can find your site.You don’t really need to work very hard to lead someone to your site if they already know who you are.
It’s nice when someone types your name into Google if information about you pops up, but you will not see a huge increase in traffic from accomplishing that goal. The number of people who know your name and know that your business is something that they’d be interested in is a very small number compared to your entire target market.
So, what should you be going for when trying to rank higher in Google?
Your goal is to attract your target market to your website.
The main way your target market will find you is through search engine searches (Google, Yahoo, etc).
When a person from your target market is doing a search in Google, what will they type into the search box?
They don’t know your name, and they don’t even know about you or your business, but they do know what their needs are. They will type search terms into Google that will help them find someone who can satisfy their needs.
If they are in need of a graphic designer, they will likely type in the search term ‘graphic designer’ or ‘graphic designer Seattle’ if they need a graphic designer in a specific location.
This is why it’s important to do keyword research.
As we’ve discussed before, from Google’s perspective, keywords are words of special significance associated with your website. Google looks at your website and also at the incoming links to your site, and tries to figure out what the gist of your site is.
The reason why Google wants to evaluate the content of your site is so that it can give helpful search results to their customers. When a search customer types search terms into Google, Google would like to give them a list of the web pages that are most likely to satisfy the searcher’s question, and they want those web pages to be ranked in order with the sites that will be the most helpful at the top and the ones that are least likely to be helpful at the end.
Google’s goal is to give the most helpful results possible to their customers.
As a website owner, you want to know what words your target market is typing into Google in order to reach sites like yours.
I have some resources on how to do keyword research, which I’ll share with you at the end of this post, but let’s assume that you’ve already done the research and you’ve chosen 3 or so keywords to target in your article marketing campaign.
1) First off, type each keyword or keyword phrase into Google and see where your site comes up.
You may be at #9, #19, #99 or not ranked at all. In a speadsheet or in a notebook, right down today’s date and also where you ranked in Google. If you’re interested in getting a better ranking in Yahoo for your keyword terms, then do this same search in Yahoo.
If you are not ranked at all for any of your keywords, that’s alright. You’re about to do something about that!
Actually I think it’s kind of exciting to be embarking on a new keyword frontier–there is nowhere to go but up! 
In order to get a good idea of how you’re progressing and keep your motivation up for the continuous work involved in having a highly ranked site, it’s a great idea to track your progress.
2) These keywords are associated with your website–they are on the same topic as your website. When you do article marketing, you will write articles on the topic of your website, and you will ideally use your keywords in your article body, your title, and your resource box as appropriate.
Of course you need to keep everything in balance and not go overboard with the keywords–your keywords should always be used in a natural sounding way and make perfect sense in the context of your article.
For best results, you should not exceed 3% keyword density for your article. Content that has over 3% keyword density tends to appear spammy and overstuffed with keywords and that can turn off publishers and search engines. (If you are a member of SubmitYOURArticle.com, we have a keyword density tool that will alert you when you’ve exceeded 3%.)
3) The key to marketing your site so that it ranks highly for your keyword terms is submitting articles on the topic of your website consistently. This is not a do it once and forget it type of thing–in order to have a higher search engine ranking and drive traffic to your site over the long term, you need to consistently work at marketing your site for the lifetime of your site.
It’s very much like working out and getting into shape.
If you work out for a few days or weeks and then stop, you will likely not see that much of a change, and you will very quickly go back to the physical state you were in before you started working out.
If you work out for several months and then stop, you will have improved your fitness level, but in stopping your workouts you will eventually revert back to what you were like before.
So, how do you achieve a physically fit body for a lifetime?
You need to get into the habit of working out consistently for the rest of your life. You come up with a workout plan that is doable and that also yields the results that you want to see in your body. You get into a groove, and pretty soon working out is just a part of your regular life–you know that if you stop taking care of your health that no matter how fit you are, your muscles will deteriorate and what was once lean and mean will be replaced with jiggly stuff.
We all know how this works with our own bodies, but a similar principal is at work in SEO and marketing your website.
If you will write articles consistently on the topic of your website and target your keywords in your title, article body and resource box (in a natural sounding way of course) then you will see results over time and you will jump up the search engine rankings for your keyword terms.
I was showing you the other day how with article marketing I was able to jump from a ranking of 87 in Yahoo up to #1 in a year’s time–That’s what I’m talking about when I mention consistency.
The effort I expended over the past year was not overwhelming and the work was entirely doable. I wasn’t submitting hundreds of articles or anything–I was just submitting a few a month, each and every month. Some months I submitted only 2, and other months I submitted 7 or 8.
Why did it work?
Because I knew what my keywords were, I wrote articles on the topic of my website, and I submitted articles consistently each month.
As you start submitting articles, this is what you’re going for–getting a higher ranking in search engines for your keywords.
And here’s something a little different and an extra bonus perk of doing article submissions–yes, you can establish yourself as an expert in your niche so that when someone does a search for your name, they are greeted with a listing of your articles.
If your name is associated with your website, then your website will also show up in the listings when someone does a search for your name. You will accomplish this as a by-product of your article submission campaign. You should include your name in your resource box, and then your articles will start to show up in the search results when someone searches for your name.
