The Secret Sauce in SEO... Part I

When showing the SEO I've been able to produce for some of my clients (and even my own website), I'm often asked, "Michael, what's the secret sauce to getting top placement on Google?". Good question - and I could probably charge hundreds, if not thousands of dollars for the secret. But I'm more than happy to share it with my blog readers. Why? Because as simple as the answer is, it's not easy - it takes work. Which is true of most things valuable.

Let me begin with the answer, "Links". That's it... my work here is done. If that's the secret sauce, the next question you should be asking is "How do I get them?". I'll go one step further. You should also be asking yourself which links are the most valuable and understand the most efficient and effective tactics for getting them.

I'm going to spend the next few days and weeks explaining the types of links that are most effective and the best methods of getting them. First let me start by explaining that the best links are the "right" links. The "right" links are those which contain the proper anchor text. Anchor text is simply the link text or the words that are visible in a link that points to your site. An example would be Internet Marketing Expert. You can see that the visible text and the URL it points to are different. Be sure to use your keywords in the link text. This is the most powerful SEO marketing tactic you can use to increase Google Search Engine Results.

Now that you have a tactic for the type of link you need, we'll start to cover the tools for building links. Today I'll be introducing you to article marketing. Article marketing is the practice of developing quality content (articles) in a given area and posting to your website or sites that aggregate content and distribute that content to other websites across the internet. This type of article distribution is what keeps many websites relevant and packed with quality information.

The tool I personally use to distribute my free marketing articles is Article Submitter Pro. This tool allows me to distribute my article to quality article distribution sites (hundreds of them) in order to get thousands of links back to my website MarketingScoop.com. When using article marketing as a primary link building strategy, the key is in the "About the Author" section. This is where you place the specific anchor text (mentioned above) with a link back to your website.

Alternatively, you can submit your articles manually. This can take a considerable amount of time but is equally effective. At the very least, I recommend submitting your articles to: EzineArticles.com, ArticleAlley.com, and GoArticles.com. These three sites alone account for about 25% of the total distribution of quality article content on the web.

If you'd like to understand the power of article marketing, just do a search on "7 Reasons to Start Blogging". On Google you'll find 2,990 results. If you search for the article with this title you'll find many more. When clicking through to these links, you'll notice that most of them have an "About the Author" section pointing back to my site. Keep in mind that this is just one article...I've writting dozens of them!