Over the past fifteen years companies and individuals have come up with all sorts of novel ways to attract people to their website. Many of the online marketing strategies people used just a few years ago are no longer viable today, making it difficult for most marketers and business owners to know which way to go in their own marketing plans.

There is one online marketing strategy that has worked for more than ten years and seems likely to work for the next ten years, as-well. It’s completely white hat SEO, to boot, making it viable for just about any business.

What I’m talking about is article marketing. However, article marketing alone is not a complete strategy, it’s the middle component. To make it work effectively you need to identify markets and then have a solid process to convert website visitors into opt-in sales leads. It’s a three-step process:

1. Identify keywords with traffic and low competition (i.e., a niche market);
2. Write and syndicate articles to generate backlinks and interested traffic; and
3. Have a compelling free information offer that’s directly in alignment with your visitor’s needs.

When you manage all three steps properly, this SEO promotion process works. When applied consistently it will improve search engine ranking and bring traffic from the article syndication sites. Plus, it’s far less costly than PPC search engine marketing methods and you don’t need costly SEO ranking software.

What you do need is a basic knowledge of Google SEO tools, the ability to write (or hire a writer), a reliable method to broadly distribute your articles, and a rock-solid email system to manage document delivery and follow-up communication. The investment is minimal, and unlike pay-per-click marketing, the benefits are on-going.

Once you have the basic article marketing capability in place, you can begin to strengthen it with:

• Blogging
• Social Networking
• Social Bookmarking

These activities help broaden your reach and they provide link diversity. However, don’t make the mistake of trying to do it all at once. Take it one step at a time and put scalable processes in place that help you ramp up your effort over time.

By creating and implementing a balanced online marketing strategy, using article marketing, blogging, social networking and social bookmarking, you will drive a steady stream of targeted traffic to your web site. As long as you continue to promote your website consistently, you will continue to receive traffic. If you stop promoting, you will send a signal to the search engines that your site is no longer important. Steady, consistent promotion is what wins the race.

Lower your search engine optimization cost and achieve top search engine ranking through the proven process of article marketing. It works!

If you value your business, you should avoid Backlink Software bots like this one.

I was horrified by what I learned.

The Get SEO Bot system works by automating the inter-linking of a network of paid and unpaid websites. Each website owner is required to add a PHP file to their site and insert a small code snippet into the footer on their home page. This puts the website in the network.

The concept is that paying customers receive one-way links to their website and non paying website members are required to accept two-way links. Links are accompanied by a brief description provided by each website owner. Paying customers can purchase as many keyword targeted links as they wish. The cost is around $90 for the first five keywords.

Do Backlink Software Bots Put Your Business At Risk?

In theory SEO software like the Get SEO Bot sound like a great system. You pay a bit of money every month and you get a few hundred backlinks. However, the problems are many:

• The system leaves a digital footprint that identifies your website as a member of a link farm network.
• Few of the websites in the network have a topic relationship to your website.
• The value of your links are diluted by the number of other, unrelated, backlinks on the same page.
• The network is permeated with affiliate marketing websites and link spam websites.
• The network is volatile. Members constantly come and go. As members leave the network, your links disappear.

If you run a valid business and use backlink software such as this — software that puts you in a linkback network — you’ll be running in a pack of low quality websites that Google wants out of its database. In other words, it could be detrimental to your visibility on the web.

This is not speculation. Google specifically sites link farms on their Link Schemes page and their Webmaster Guidelines page.

It’s not a matter of if Google will discover and reject sites that participate in the SEO Bot networks, it’s a matter of when.

The Alternative To Backlink Software

If you want top search engine optimization results the answer is to start producing great SEO content. It’s the number one factor that separates quality websites from all the rest.

Sure, you still need a steady stream of quality backlinks, but this happens naturally when you create interesting, value-packed pages. While you’re at it, re-purpose some of your great content for syndication to article sites. This is the number one “white hat” way to get highly targeted, keyword backlinks while you wait for your fans to back link to you naturally. It’s a safer, more effective SEO strategy than link farms and gimmick software.

SEO management takes time and effort. If you can pay someone to flip a switch to make something happen, it’s not only too good to be true, it may put your business at risk.