Last week I wrote about pay-per-click (PPC) search engine marketing. This week I’m going to discuss SEO campaign management. 

SEO stands for search engine optimization and it’s a great way to put on an SEO campaign that won’t cost you a cent.

 That’s correct. Free.

 While it won’t cost you money, it will cost you your time because you will be writing search engine optimized articles and submitting them to free article directories. Write and submit five articles a week for three months to a handful of directories and you’ll find the hits to your website will grow exponentially. It’s called “article marketing” and it’s a great method of SEO campaign management.

Writing these articles is not hard. For example, let’s say you’re a personal injury lawyer in Baltimore. You’ve done some research and you discover that the keyword phrase “personal injury lawyer Maryland,” often is used by folks in your area searching for an attorney.

 What you will do is choose a topic about personal injury, perhaps “How to choose a Personal Injury Lawyer,” and you will write a 300-500 word article on that topic. In addition, you will need to sprinkle the search term mentioned above in that article. Try to use the exact phrase (although since “personal injury lawyer Maryland” reads awkwardly, it’s OK to use “personal injury lawyer in Maryland”) several times in your article.

Then submit your article to the article directories. (Do a search yourself for “article directory” to find some. Ezinearticles.com is the largest.) You’ll see that the free directories allow you to put together a “resource box.” In that box you’ll place a bit of information about yourself or your services as well as a link to a page within your website.

 How does this help you in your SEO campaign management? Several ways? Editors of online magazines often need free material to fill space. They use the articles at the directories for their publications. It’s free to use, but they must use your article exactly as written, including the resource box. In addition, articles in these directories get picked up by the search engines all the time. In fact, you should also search for directories in your profession that accept articles. Expertlaw.com, for example, accepts articles from attorneys.

Putting together an article marketing SEO campaign management program may not get you the website hits as quickly as a PPC campaign. But if time is no object, and money is, article marketing can be a great way to get visitors flocking to your website.