Keyword Elite v2.0

Posts Tagged ‘articles’

Despite being a relatively new industry, around for only 10 years or so, SEO tends to move so that trends come and go so quickly, that what seemed fresh this year is now “passe”.

Those oldies amongst us will remember when META tags were all the rage, and now the debate is not around just how much benefit they provide, but rather whether they provide *any* benefit at all. How times change.

Article submissions are another hot topic. For many SEOers, submitting articles has been a staple of their link building. After all, some of the larger article repositories certainly rank well and (the assumption is) must provide a high quality link.

Others SEO professionals argue that once a method gets adopted en-masse, its effectiveness quickly dissapears and article submissions are certainly mainstream now.

So is it worth submitting articles for the purpose of SEO?

There's no hard and fast answer with this. It really depends on your own resources and just how much benefit you think you'll get. Article repositories certainly provide incoming links, and speaking from personal experience, I’ve still had success in getting a totally new site indexed and ranking moderately well from just one powerfull article link, from just one site.

Just because it’s old hat doesn’t mean you should totally discount article marketing, for both SEO and traffic generation. My advice would be to test the waters, and if you find you can get good results, then stick with it.

The ideal way to test this scenario is to expirement and try it on a relatively new website, then you’ll be able to get a much better idea of the sort of ranking improvements and traffic improvements without all the noise.

Of course there are always other factors involved when it comes to SEO, so as usual, your mileage may vary when it comes to article submission. If you’re after a place to submit articles then there are certainly enough websites on the net which are totally free to try out the theory.

Technorati Tags: article, articles, back links, effective, incoming links, Links, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, SEO, submission, submit

I was endeavoring to write a novel for over 12 months Don’t expect to make money as an unpublished authored when it comes to that novel you are working on. And with the bills piling up and the rent overdue by a week, I decided I’d have to take on second job. My foremost work is to take night classes in creative writing to low skilled workers at local community college.

I’d just put in an application at a local bookstore when a writer friend of mine told me about online article writing. I rejected the idea immediately, because I did not identify myself as being a journalist or an article writer. At least until he told me how much money could be made. No, it wasn’t a six-figure salary, but he was making a lot more than I ever could working at a bookstore. He indicated he was free to take on the task of authoring pieces, because his time was his own. The advantage of his job was not having to spend cash on gas or tolls, because he worked out of his own home.

Although I was a bit unsure, I gave it a go anyway. To be honest, I was a little intimidated at first. I was very unsure if I would be able to find success at it. I wasn’t sure I could write articles, as my expertise was in writing fiction. My friend assured me that there was nothing to it. He said all I had to do was create a writing resume and submit it to any one of a hundred freelance writing sites online. Companies created the article directory sites because they were looking for other people to write their articles for them.

Article directories are no-cost sites that provide access to intelligent and thoughtful articles. The person creating the articles will get guidance as to what topics to cover, which then get submitted to the article directory. If the article is accepted, the writer receives two back links, which he then connects to the website of the business he works for. The purpose of the article is to drive traffic of interested consumers directly to the business’s website, where they can then purchase products.

After I had landed my first client, I wrote ten articles on the best way to wax hardwood floors. My employer asked me to be as creative as possible, which gave me the ability to write in a style that was basically narrative fiction. Once I was finished with the web content, I next took care of submission to the pre-determined article directory of their choice. While all of the articles were not accepted the first time out, the article directory gave me expert advice on how to improve my articles and give them just what they were looking for.

Instead of working at the bookstore to pay my bills I started working for an article directory. It even paid my rent. I was pleased that I sent my work to an article directory that provided helpful material at no cost.

Technorati Tags: article directory, article marketing, article writing, articles, content, free content, journal articles, niche articles

Most people who build a website eventually figure out that the only way to make anything, no matter how cool your site is, no matter how great the content is – is that traffic is king. Without people seeing what you have to offer, there is no point in offering it. Think about it this way - if you have invented something that is truely great and know it will be a big hit. If you advertise in the desert, it does not matter because no one sees it. If you choose to advertise in a city where its very busy, everyone sees it. the key difference is the level of traffic. Article directories are like a gateway to the city from the desert.

Submitting to article directories is very easy, but first you need to do keyword research. While this may seem slow and boring (or even a pain), it really has to be done to get decent results from your work. The link from the article directory uses the keywords, and they are also used within the article elsewhere as well. The search engines use the keywords that link to your site as part of the analysis for the ranking formula. The reason you need to do research is there is a fine balance between useless (as in never used search terms), and super competitive ones where it will be too hard initially to try to get ranking for. So when you submit your articles to an article directory, you want the keywords to have decent search volume, but not massive so you can get the most bang for your time.

Your article will be displayed with thousands of others in the article directory. Users needing content for their sites come to article directories and then grab content to fill in their site. Additionally, people subscribe to the RSS feeds from article directories that have them to get fresh content via RSS when it is published. Sometimes an article directory is also considered an authority by Google and others, thereby getting a link coming from that site garners more weight than from other links that do not have this authority.

Technorati Tags: article directory, article marketing, articles, content, free articles, free content, journal articles, publish articles

Article directories help you in two ways - they get you ranked faster on new keywords and they help spread your marketing message. While you can write tons of articles about generic related content to your site, you can also write articles that are a review of your services, or are a promotional piece that links to your site. Article directories usually do not discriminate against such content unless the quality is poor or it appears overly spammy.

Some article directories such as Ezine have human editors that read and approve every article. An article directory like this does not allow links in the content other than would be required to understand what you are writing about. These types of article directories do allow you to have a signature area where you can place a follow link back to your website. For this type of article directory, you want your content to appear professional and unbiased, and most of all avoid sounding like a sales pitch.

Remember, any articles you submit with a link to your site will usually be associated with your brand (or remembered as such). So you always want to submit quality articles and not a lot of junk that does not read or make sense even if an article directory allows you to do so without anyone rejecting your article. If you want to have others help you create articles, make sure you filter them to keep quality high so your articles get redistributed more. Also, you should try to not submit multiple copies of the exact same text to different article directories. A few times is ok, but when the same one is distributed (and then redistributed by others who grab it) too many times with exactly the same text, you may actually get penalized by the search engines rather than the boost you wanted.

Technorati Tags: article, article directories, article directory, article marketing, articles, content, free articles, free content, Internet Marketing, journal articles, publish articles, SEO, web content

Any website owner who starts down the path of internet marketing will soon discover how many "guru's" are out there all claiming some secret trick to boost your search engine rankings.  The reality is there are a few things to really pay attention to, but most of it really comes down to hard work.Depending on what keywords you are trying to rank with, you can get good results in as little as 1 week, or it may take months of hard work.

Asisde from basic webpage SEO stuff to make sure everything is done correctly, the biggest single factor still in your rankings is the number of links and where they come from.  The PR(page rank) of the site linking to you is important, as is the content on that site.  Recipricol links used to work really well (you link me, I link you) but now its really downplayed by Google as a valid method of links.

The easiest way to get links is through article marketing.  This is not the least work path, its the easiest as far as results go in my opinion.  The setup is simple:

1. Do some keyword research on your topic.Pick from two to four keywords you will focus on.  Make sure they get decent search volume but do not go after stuff that is too generic (meaning it will have unusually large seached volume) - those will be way too hard to rank on in a reasonable time.
2. Plan on writing 10 - 12 articles of 300-400 words each, using 2 of the keywords with links to your site in each article, with no more than 3 links per article total.Use the kwyword itself as your link text, not http://.
3. Publish 4 of the articles on a major article directory that has good ranking such as Ezine Articles or ArticlesBase.  These have human reviewers so it will take a bit of time to get your article published.  Luckily they do not expect it to be the first time its published, so while you are waiting there you can post it elsewhere.
4. Make sure you get some software that helps to spin the article content and links.Spinning an article allows you to auto substitute other words or phrases into the article each time it is published so you get a slightly unique version to a totally new verson depending on how much you spin it.  DO NOT try to use rewriting software - I have seen none that do a decent job - usually it reads like garbage and that will not help your rankings.  If you spin an article right, you can easilly get 10-20 different reading articles from a single article, enough to not worry about duplicate content out there (and possible penalties). 
5. The next step is to mass distribute your articles to sites looking for great content.  You can do this manually for free, or find some tools to purchase that can greatly speed this up.  I usually choose to pay some money in the savings of time.  There are so many things to do, you have to trade off somewhere.  You want to make sure you spread out the distribution - its unnatural for any site to go from no links to 500 links in 1 day - what is more natural is 0 to 10 to 18 to 25 to 40 … over many weeks build the level up.
6. You should start tracking where you rank on the few keywords you have chosen.After you have used article directories to get about 300 links or so you should start to see a boost in rankings.  Some keywords that are not as competitive, much less, and of course, some it might take thousands.  Your goal should be to get on the top 2 pages of Google for your search terms. 
7. In addition to the article work, you can also use social media accounts to link to each of the articles you publish AND also to your main web site.You will also want to make at least one squidoo lens about your site and then use it to link to your site.

Sites all want fresh content on them to improve their quality score.Most want articles about their site topic to keep the viewer on the site longer and to get better search enging ranking.  This is exactly why article marketing works - you get links on disribution sites, webmasters get to search for content to add to their site from what is published.

Technorati Tags: article directory, article marketing, articles, content, free articles, free content, journal articles

Article marketing is probably one of the easier understood ways to actually get ranking on the search engines.  And more importantly, its totally above board when done right and you dont have to worry about getting blacklisted.It is often avoided because of the additional perceived "work" involved.Lazy people who are looking for 'shortcuts" avoid it at all costs.If you do it right, the hours and days you spend now will pay off for years to come.

A good first rule is to only write about topics you are very familiar with.It is just easier.  Most of the time people create sites or businesses around stuff they know (occasionally no).This really makes it simple as you are writing about what you know.  Of course you can easily do research too - just go to an article directory, pick your niche topic and start reading.It is really amazing how fast you can pick up basic information, and use that to create an article.Also, make sure you write in a simple to understand method.  There is no point in using fancy words - afterall the primary focus is the backlinks in the article.  This is not a doctoral thesis - you want to create an article in 15-20 minutes and move on to modifications and other stuff.

A second rule to follow is to make sure you write the article so that you can rewrite it with ease.  Why?? Well a few years ago you could just create a single copy, spam it 1000's of times all over the internet and get huge ranking immediately.  Now days, the search engines are smart enough to see that they are duplicate copies - a few is ok, but having 1000’s you will actually get penalized for.This is where a re write of the article comes in.  There are software tools out there that can help you - BUT do not let them do it for you.Most often the result is a bunch of illegible garbage.  The search engines are onto this too (they have semantics) and you will get penalized, plus it just makes your site linked look bad that such an idiot that cannot even write would link to you (readers would not know it was you who wrote it).  One of the best tools I have ever used for rewriting exists at My Article Network.  Not only can you completely rewrite articles with ease with the tools on board, but it then auto distributes your article across 10,000 blogs over time.

A good third rule is to try to limit your use of links in the article.  Most article directories limit you anyway but outside of that you can post on blogs and elsewhere with as many links as you want.Use common sense here again, the search engines are much smarter than that now.If one link is good, 200 is not better.  In general, dont use more than 1 link per 200 words or so.  In addition, you want to be consistent with your keyword links to get benefit.  Do not try to master 20 keywords at once by linking different ones each time.You will need some form of repetition to get any measurable boost at all.Focus on 2 or 3 keywords and move your ranking up on those first.Once you achieve ranking on page 1 or 2 on Google, then you can move on to other words to broaden the base.

A forth rule to remember is repetition makes it all work.For the first month, you should plan on 1 article every 2 days to get it started.  Even after you get higher ranking, you still need to pump in some linked articles at least once a week to keep it fresh.  The search engines look at the date of the posts that have the link - over time they decay the value of those links if they see nothing new coming in.You will want accounts at all the major article networks such as Ezine that you can post on- search google for a list.

Done properly, article marketing can be a central hub to other stuff you do to boost your overall site ranking and visibility.

Technorati Tags: article, article marketing, articles, content, free content, Internet Marketing, web content