I have done a lot of research on this subject. I have tried for years to just get one site I build visible to people searching in the Google index. When I studied Search Engine Optimization back at the start of the internet, the key was apparently Meta Tags. I started by slamming my pages with meta tags. Making sure my code was just a step better than the competition. I looked at sites ranking toward the top and I was astounded at what I found their keywords to be. Reputable businesses had meta keywords like Free XXX, Nudity, etc. Why? Because it that day these were big search terms, even though not related to their business, they wanted to pull any free traffic they good. One specific one selling contact lenses had stuffed their keywords with all kinds of crazy things. But they were ranking number 1. As you can imagine, I duplicated everything I could in their code I waited months, and I was never ranked anywhere.

So then I got into the impression that the size of the site had a lot to do with ranking. Some of the topics I have chosen to build websites on were impossible to build a large site on. Every number one site I saw on google though, if you did a site:http://www.domain.com search had thousands of indexed pages. Then I stumbled upon a program called Traffic Booster Pro. This was the answer to my question. This program basically builds a bunch of junk pages that take content from RSS feeds and make it unique by randomizing the words. It creates thousands of pages all optimized and linked together, and generates a sitemap. Google was crawling my site like crazy. And for one of the most searched words on the internet, I ranked in position 60 within a few weeks. I was so excited, I thought for sure I was right, I needed the bigger site, the larger the site the better I would rank. If I couldn’t build that many pages, this program would do it for me, but when my users click on one of those they are redirected to my main page. I got some traffic for a while, and then one day my site crashed for about an hour. The reason it crashed is because Google was crawling it so much the traffic overloaded the data center that I was housing my information. Not the server I was on, the entire data center. My sitemap tracked in Google Sitemaps had thousands of errors. I had my datacenter folks get back online. When I checked my rankings I found all those keywords I was ranked for were dropped to nothing. I went from 60 to not in the top 1000. I thought this would be rectified soon, I adjusted my crawl rate, let my data center know this site was taking a lot of traffic. I waited 2 months and my rankings never came back. The site I had has a unique domain name that is not even a word, and to this day that site doesn’t even rank number one for the domain name. Therefore that site has been penalized, there is no other answer.

I then went on to exchange links. I bought programs like SEO elite, which I do recommend for anybody to use, but not for this purpose. More on that program later. I also joined Linkmarket.net. I exchanged links like wild fire, making sure that my anchor text changed, following all the Guru’s advice. They claimed this is how they got their rankings. Bull, exchanging links is absolutely worthless. After doing this for a month, I went to see if the Guru’s were still offering link exchanges on their sites, if they had partner directories. Yeah right, there was no directories. They had already realized this was an ineffective strategy. Now links do help, search on Google for click here. Adobe ranks #1 and they don’t even have click here text on the page.

So to answer the question, no link exchanging does nothing for SEO. The two ways to get your sites link that are not exchanges you can share information or make link bait. The article that you are reading right now helps my rankings. I just write experiences and information that I have retained in knowledge, the distribute it to webmasters to update content on their site. This helps the webmasters by making Google visit their site often since they are constantly adding content. Best part is when they like and add my content they add a link to my site. I write articles several times a day about different things that relate to my website. This is how I get links to my site, without exchanging them. I exchange information of a one-way text link.

There really are two ways like I said. Link bait, and content sharing. Link bait is like the chicken website for Burger King if you can remember that. If you saw it you would remember it was a guy in a chicken suit on video that did stupid things. It ranked Burger King number one for the single word chicken. That is quite a jump. It was people liked it an virally linked to it from their sites. The drawback to link bait is you better be extremely creative, or have someone build link bait for an astronomical price. There is a better way.

I prefer to use content sharing like this article you are reading. I publish informative articles and distribute them to directories that webmasters go to get content for their site. If people like my information they will publish my article. For instance this article will probably get published by SEO website trying to provide current advice on improving rankings. This benefits the webmaster because if they are constantly adding new content spiders will hit their site more, therefore each change will be indexed faster. That catch is that to use my content they must provide a link back to me in my resource box. This box cannot be modified. If no webmaster likes my article, it is still published in 1000s of directories that I submit to, creating great links back to my website. I do not have an outbound link on my site. I have meta tags that are almost worthless, but my 3 page site ranks very well for keywords due to content sharing.

To conclude it won’t hurt to have a well coded big site, but that is not what pulls rankings. The best rankings I ever obtained are from submitting articles. I love to write the different articles and share information or knowledge I have for free. Also Google can tell that I am manually writing these because there is no duplicate information in them across the network. So they know that I am not trying to steal rankings, that I am providing legit information and a link to my site. This causes each link to have a nice weight with google. My job has become to promote my website through distributing information.

I have to say if you can figure out the technique, there is money to be made from article marketing. If you have studied the internet and SEO at all in the recent past, you would know that articles really are the way to go right now. I like to use it to promote all of my websites. I earn money through my websites when they rank better in the search engines. The more they rank in the search engines, the more traffic I get. At the same time my articles also bring traffic to my website. I don’t think article marketing is a waste of time. If you have time, and want to flourish your business then get writing.

You can always find ebooks on the market which well help you write articles. Some tell you where to look for information, some tell you techniques to sell in your articles. I would recommend actually writing all your articles. The search engines are very smart and will bust you for writing crap and posting it on the internet. I manually write all my articles, on top of that I write several versions just so I can get more use out of each article. I write article to tell people things, and then use a resource box to point people and the search engines at my site. I think the search engines really like article marketing because they can decipher the information and then reward the posters of the articles, especially those of us who do this the legit way.

Article marketing can work to draw traffic to your website. Many people out there though are sending a lot of articles out a day so that really reduces the number of visitors you will draw from each article. If you write a really good persuasive or informative article, it is possible more people will use it for content which may bring you more traffic. I think it is a lot of fun to sit down and write, and publish this stuff on the internet. I wouldn’t recommend counting solely on article traffic to make money. If you are promoting affiliate links through articles, you might as well give up. The time spent does not pay off. Get a website and really promote it, or just work a day job.

In my experience I have been rewarded by doing article marketing. I recommend it to anybody who wants to try it. The key is to find a good method to submit your articles, and write as many unique articles as you can. Be an expert in your field, and live with passion.

Do you know there are two kinds of traffic? They are targeted traffic and non-targeted traffic. Targeted traffic from people who are interested in your product or service and would be more likely to spend money on what you offer.

And non-targeted traffic consists of the people who are not interested in buying what you have. They will not part with their cash for what you are selling.

Obviously, it’s the targeted traffic that we’re interested in generating. It’s no need to try to convince the non-targeted groups into buying from you. You’ll be wasting both your time and effort.

You may also hear that most free traffic sources will give you untargeted visitors, but here you will learn a surefire way to get targeted traffic for Free!

It’s a “fool proof” way to get targeted traffic & passive earning. I need to warn you that the work is dull and boring. But it WORKS extremely well!

So how it works?

1.Do a keyword research, find keywords that are relevant for website. These keywords must be low competition that are frequently searched but do not have too many competition on the net.

2.Write your article around those keywords. Make sure your article title is unique that nobody uses your title.

3.Create a resource box at the end of each of your articles and put link(s) to your site. Put relevant keywords of your site in the text link(s) .

4.Submit your article to article sites. Only submit to those article directories that with high traffic and Google Page Rank.

5.Repeat this process to make it work – YOU SHOULD WRITE AT LEAST ONE EZINE ARTICLE EVERY WEEK.

I suggest you write 3 new articles per day.

Once you have submitted your article, you can expect to show up on the first page of the results in Google within a week, and generally stay there for between 3 weeks and 2 months.

Summary

You see that in this way, you don’t need any money to set it up – unlike some of other paid ways.

But remind yourself to be consistent. Most marketers just try something for some time, and when they don’t see results immediately, they often discard it. You may be the exception. If you are, you will see dramatic results.

It is a time-consuming method, you won’t see results overnight. But it provides results for long term – you will be getting free, targeted traffic for years.

 Webmasters use article marketing for two purposes. One is for SEO (search engine optimization) in which case they are primarily looking to get links to their website from article directories and any other sites that happen to publish their article. The other is for traffic itself, from readers of the article that follow the link in the author’s bio section.

Publishing articles for traffic requires more attention to detail than just publishing them for backlinks. They need to be of better quality and thought through a little more. You need to catch the reader’s interest enough to make them want more information and click the link at the end.

There are two ways to use articles for targeting traffic. One is the “bum marketing” method where the article itself is targeting long-tail keywords in a related market. This strategy involves publishing the article at ezinearticles.com, squidoo.com, or hubpages.com and then establishing some links to the article page to help get it ranked well. The traffic comes from search engines, as people searching for the targeted keyword find your article in the search results. A little traffic can also come from within the website that the article was published at. These types of articles should be of decent size, well-written, and informative.

The other method of targeting traffic with articles is writing them for ezine publishers. These are people who have mailing lists that will publish your article in one of their newsletters. This type of article should be shorter and more to the point, as not to take up too much space in the ezine email. They need compelling titles to get the attention of the list owner who is scanning the article directory for material.

Another little-known tactic is to write articles for highly-ranked authority sites in a related (but not competing) market. Here you have a website with a lot of traffic in a prominent position. If this site will publish your articles, they will get a lot of reads. Approach the web owner with a proposition to provide free quality content in exchange for a link in your bio-box. (The best way to approach them might be to snail-mail them from the whois information address, as most emails like this don’t even get opened and this type of site is sure to get a lot of them.)

Finally, using articles for blog posts is guaranteed to get traffic if you have an established blog with quality content. All you have to do is ping the blog aggregate sites with a service such as pingoat.com, and submit your posts to the top social media sites (tools like onlywire.com make this a quick and easy task).

If you need to increase your quality website traffic, it’s hard to beat article marketing. If you don’t have the time or inclination to write the articles yourself, quality writers stand at the ready to provide this service for you at less than $7 per article. This is something you cannot afford to ignore. Content is still king.