If I asked you why you’re interested in article link building, what would you tell me?Chances are you would look at me like I was kind of stupid and say “Uhh, obviously to build links.” To which my response would be “Really? Because I don’t think that is the reason.”

You see building links through articles or any other means is not the end goal. The end goal is to get people to your website. What we all hope is that the links in articles help raise our site’s position in the search engines, so that we get more visitors. That’s right its about visitors, it’s not about links. Let me give you an example how you are missing the boat on article publishing if you just go after links.

Lets say that you’re an insurance agent in Missouri and you write, or have some articles written, to publish in ezines. If one of your focuses is on health insurance, you might title an article “7 Considerations for Buying a Health Insurance Plan.” But here’s the rub, there are over 1,600,000 results for the term this article is most likely to show up for “health insurance plans” with 223 daily searches for it. While the 223 daily visitors might be nice to have, it’s not likely that either your site nor your article is going to rank for this term.

What you may have a chance of ranking for is Individual Health Insurance Plans, because there are only 113,000 serps for this term which still gets 132 searches a day. Half the search volume, but a fraction of the competition. Even better than this, there are only 3,100 results for the exact match of “Missouri individual health insurance plans,” and 48 searches a day for it. Obviously, these are the searchers you want, so you take the article distribute it to Ezines Calling it “7 Considerations for Buying an Individual Health Insurance Plan.” You then put a reworded copy of the article on your Website using the same title, but including the name of the state in it, and you are almost guaranteed to pick a top search engine ranking placement. Of course, you will want to remember to repeat the phrase in your intro sentence and in your last paragraph.

So the next time you are thinking about “article link building,” stop and ask yourself how much more targeted traffic you could get from a well optimized article. If you don’t understand how to determine the best keywords to use go to my short post on researching keywords.