It is almost hard to believe that article marketing as a means of promoting a business is still relatively new. For many online entrepreneurs it seems as though search engine optimized content has been around for decades. Yet even the internet and world wide web itself is still relatively new. Looking back over the past decade and a half it becomes easy to see why not only has article marketing flourished as a way of marketing online businesses, but was virtually an inevitability as the web grew ever larger and more encompassing.
In the first few years of the web’s emergence as a global means of communicating and carrying out business it was relatively easy to attract an audience, since there were so few websites that finding a niche market was little more than simply choosing a market in which to work. All markets were niche at that time, and simple web directories were enough to allow the serious contenders to be found by anyone interested in their services or products.
As the web grew, exponentially, it became increasingly hard for web directories to be kept up to date and relevant, with some moving toward a more automated system. But with automation came corruption, with business owners quickly realising the ease with which they could become dominant within a particular field. Looking for information or businesses on the web quickly became more difficult, and early search engines were an inevitable replacement for all but the most thorough and incorruptible directories.
But search engines were inherently flawed, relying almost solely on the combination of established web directory libraries and automated evaluation of websites based, to a large degree, on aspects such as meta tags and website names. To guarantee a top listing within any particular market it quickly became known that the best method was to stuff web pages full of relevant keywords, and create bloated meta tag descriptions and keyword descriptions which would rival any thorough entry in even the most comprehensive thesaurus.
Online marketing appeared to be a seesaw, with businesses weighing down their side with techniques designed to boost their visibility and dominance within a market, and then search engines devising ever more sophisticated methods to redress the balance and improve the relevance of their results, and the appropriate categorization and ranking for sites irrespective of their attempts to twist the search algorithms to their own advantage. It seemed that the early days of the world wide web were witnessing a battle between the advertisers and marketers on the one hand, and the librarians and custodians of the digitized world on the other.
Today, the major search engines, perhaps especially Google, have เว็บตรง developed fiendishly complex algorithms and methods of scanning, evaluating and cross referencing web content that any method designed to fool the search engines is more likely to result in a website being blacklisted or at least demoted towards the oblivion which is anything below the first three pages of results.
There are many ways in which an online business can help to promote its name, attract customers and boost profits, and any entrepreneur will be keen to employ most, if not all, of these methods. These include, for example:
· Web content optimization
· PPC advertising
· External listings & backlinks
· Article marketing
It is only through the careful and appropriate application of each of these four areas that full success can usually be achieved. Marketing a website requires a holistic approach, and omitting to spend adequate time on any one of these areas is likely to see less impact or eventual success than considering all of them as aspects of a single marketing initiative.
Article marketing derived from a number of factors all of which occurred at around the same time as the search engines became wise to the many less savoury optimization techniques being employed by increasingly sly marketers. By being able to analyze web pages and online content search engines were able to identify the relevance and context of any particular page. It is for this reason that entering a search phrase such as ‘cordial orange’ will not generate results offering websites focussing on friendly fruits. The search engines’ algorithms are able to scan the words on a page and make assumptions, based on previous experience, as to the likely context.