I’ve been article marketing for several months now, and I’d like to share some data with you.  I have several hundred articles live on many of the more popular article directories.  I’ve been tracking referrals to my landing pages from all of them.   Each one of my articles is written around one keyword phrase.

I looked at the keyword phrases of the top 50 articles, ranked by the number of referrals to my landing pages.  I wondered if there were common characteristics for the top-performing articles/keywords.  What I found probably won’t surprise a veteran article marketer, but for me it was a bit of a revelation.

The top keywords had an average of less than 200,000 quoted results – that means if you Google the keyword phrase in quotation marks, the results averaged less than 200,000.  Some were higher, some much lower, but the average was around 200K.  The top 10 performing keyword phrases had a quoted results average of around 100,000.  (the graphic below shows how to find this figure).

The other common stat for the top-performing keyword phrases was a little more difficult to calculate.  What I computed was the average number of backlinks (defined by Yahoo! Explorer) for the top ten Google results for a given keyword.  One easy way to get this number is downloading the SeoQuake Firefox extension.  You take the average of the Yahoo backlinks for the top ten results – and that average for my best article/keyword combinations was  about 2,000 (1,000 for the to ten keywords).

So, to sum up, the vital stats I found were:

• Less than 200,000 quoted results (closer to 100,000 is better)
• Less than 2,000 average backlinks for the top ten results (closer to 1,000 is better)

Now keep in mind  – this ONLY applies to article marketing, don’t use these guidelines for promoting your own domain.  The article directories have better rankings than you will ever have.   It’s easier to rank for a phrase on EzineArticles than your own domain, for instance.

The problem with this method is that it can get very time-consuming if you have a lot of keywords to check.  The easy solution is a little software program called WebComp Analyst.  It is simply the most slam-dunk piece of software I’ve ever bought for article marketing.  Put in your keywords and it spits out the very stats I have just outlined for you.  No fuss, no muss.  You can even export your results into Excel.  In my next post, I’ll show you a real cool way to manipulate your data from WebComp Analyst.

Many article marketers choose keywords for which their articles will never rank in Google.  My method outlined here will start getting your landing pages some serious traffic.