You have written an article with a great title appealing to both the search engines and the readers. Learn how to write a resource box inside my article.
The signature is that part of an article where you put a call to action and insert a link to your website. It is where the effectiveness of article marketing comes in. Therefore,
a poorly written signature can render your article marketing efforts worthless.
The signature section generally appears after the article body. You can use this part to talk about your business, product or service or anything else you like. This part anyway should not be taken lightly.
The call to action
You have written an article with a great title appealing to both the search engines and the readers. As well as a body that is very informative but not totally revealing to readers. It is time to get them to your website and this can be done using a call to action.
A “call to action” is an advertising term for a word, phrase or sentence that is been used with the intention of convincing someone to take a particular action. In our case, a call to action in the signature will be aimed at convincing the reader visit our site by clicking the link in the signature.
A good call to action will be very clear and targeted. For example, if you provided “tips on skin care” in your article, then the website you are sending them to should be extremely about “skin care”.
If your article is about “skin care tips” and you are sending them to a general “beauty website”, your conversion is going to be quite low. Because the readers are looking for a information on skin care which is a sub-niche of the beauty niche, they are not necessarily going to be interested in any other related to beauty.
So, if your article is about skin care, your signature link should go straight to a website that is about the very same niche. I wonder why most articles in the directories are linking to irrelevant pages.
Your call to action must tell the visitors what to do. It must let them know what is in for them if they click on your link and if possible give them a path (your website link) to get in. You should also offer an incentive to visit your site.
As it is in the example below, the author’s call to action is a good one. She stated exactly what you will get at her website and clearly the next step is to visit her website which is at YourHomeIsOrganized.com
Her article is about “home organization tips” so she told them to get more of the tips she just gave at her website at YourHomeIsOrganized.com which is extremely related.
Anchor-text and internal linkingThe author also used an anchor text with “home organization tips” to link back to her site. Using anchor text does not necessarily have an effect on the conversion with the readers, it is however important for the Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Majority of the search engines uses the text linking to a site in their algorithms to determine the keywords and phrases which individual website or page would rank for.
With signatures, there is also a great opportunity of getting links pointing to your internal pages! This is a very good thing to do because getting many backlinks to your internal pages is very helpful for SEO purpose. Getting backlinks to internal pages is generally a pain in the ass, so it is huge what the signature space offers.
Getting homepage backlinks is somewhat very easy, that is just how it is. So, you must take the chance to link to your internal pages whenever you find such opportunity.
Many article directories allow you to have 2-3 links within your signature. Ezinearticles.com, which the biggest and most popular of them, lets you have only two links.
You don’t have to worry so much about that because many articles directories still gives the chance to have 3 links. For those that allow 3, the best way to throw in your links into the signature is to insert one link with anchor text to your homepage. Add the second link also with anchor text to a relevant internal page. And finally, add the last link to also to your Homepage but this time without anchor text.
Now that you have known all that, here is an example of a good signature, with a nice call to action, internal linking, incentive to click and anchor text:
“ To grab your free skin care report and to receive more skin care tips, visitskincaretips.com where we provide all of this and much more! ”
The “free skin care report” will be linked to an internal page containing information on how they will download their free skin care report. And it also gives an incentive to click.
A “free skin care tips” would be linked to the homepage. “www. skincaretips. com” would obviously be the link to the homepage of the website.
One a final note, keep in mind that some website owners usually copy and paste articles from the directories on to their site without the use of the “publisher” function that is provided by the article directories, which includes html and takes away the risk of links not being live. This renders the use of anchor text useless as the link may not be copied, and your website will be left out.
This is why it is important to at least use a direct URL (www. skincaretips. com/) once in your signature because many Content Management Systems are going to activate these links automatically. You might not be lucky to get this every time, but without a straight link, you will be losing out too many times.
