News Flash - by Kimmi

When you ask about getting links for your organic SEO marketing, you’re often told to start article writing – but is it an easy way to get links? Well, sure – but is it an easy way to get traffic? Yes, if you’re good at it. No, if you churn out poorly written articles with the same information as thousands of other articles out there.

First of all, back links in the right places can give your website great exposure. Article marketing is certainly one of the easiest ways to gain viable links… if you’re good at writing articles or are prepared to pay a ghostwriter to write them for you.

The concept of article marketing goes like this:

1. You write an article and put a compelling resource box with your website link at the end of the content.
2. You submit your article to an article site, gaining a back link.
3. Depending on which site you submitted to, that site passes your article on to other sites, which provide you with more back links.
4. People read your article and pass it on to others so your site gets exposure.
5. Some of those people publish your article on their websites or blogs – more links, more exposure.
6. Other people publish your article in their newsletters – more links, more exposure.
7. Still others may publish your article in an eZine or eBook – more links, more exposure.

Now, the hope is your article will go from 1 to 7. It might… if it’s interesting and/or unusual. Another hope is at step 2, where you submit your article to a very topic relevant site, such as a health site (instead of article directory) for a health article. You then get a very relevant back link, as well as relevant traffic.

Here are a few reasons why some articles never get to #7:

• Many articles currently available on the web are… well, blah. They’re boring, with standard (or sub-standard) information that’s been shared several times before in exactly the same way.
• Many articles are written using poor English or poor structure. They’re difficult to read, difficult to understand and so, are destined to lay on the cutting room floor. These articles are the wallflowers of content at the copywriting dance, never to be taken out and shown to the world.
• Some articles are well written, with great English, perfect grammar and excellent flow, but so full of industry terms the average layperson can’t understand them. They might be seen, but often, you want the layperson coming to your site, right? After all, if you have a business to consumer (B2C) company, you want the consumer – not your competition – to understand what you’re saying.

Many think the answer to not reaching #7 is to just add volume to their article marketing. If two articles don’t perform well, maybe putting out twenty would help. It seems reasonable; it’ll bring twenty beautiful links.

Yet, what are links without traffic? In addition, it’s probably helpful to realize that, while Yahoo may count ten links from the same site as ten links, Google generally only counts it once. To Google: 500 links from the same site = 1 link from the site. If you’re going for quantity rather than quality, you’d better find a few hundred article sites.

Before your next article marketing campaign, ask yourself what article marketing is for, and look at the sites you’ve previously used. You see, although article marketing brings back links, it’s really recognition you want. You want to garner enough positive attention that people start coming to you as an industry expert.

Rather than submit, submit, submit, be the industry expert you are. Consider the information you’ve gathered through the years as a high commodity. Don’t share it with the world; be picky (or precise, if you’d like a more professional word) about the sites you put that information on. If you carefully consider each site in terms of relevance, traffic and interested visitors – and carefully write your articles in terms of quality, tone and information – your article marketing will be a grand success. Would love to hear your input.

Directory Submissions & Article Marketing
Directory submissions and article marketing are touted as two of the top ways to develop a slew of links, raise your traffic and get those conversions. Many who pick up knowledge of SEO around the Net jump on directory submissions because it sounds like an easy form of SEO.

It is, but it’s also time consuming, and the same can be said for article marketing. In fact, if you’re doing your own website SEO with these two tactics and it’s not taking a long time, you’re probably doing it wrong.

Article Marketing
Article marketing works something like this:

1. You write an article (or two, or three) on your chosen topic.
2. You submit this article to an article site, such as ezinearticles.com.
3. People find this article through keyword search and read it.
4. People then follow the link back to your site.

It sounds easy, but it’s a little more complicated than that.

Many beginning Do-It-Yourselfers (and SEOs, for that matter), use one article and submit it to several sites. Others take an article already on their website and submit it. The problem with these two methods is duplicate content.

A lot of article sites will now deny an article once it’s been posted elsewhere. Those that don’t (with some exceptions) are probably not worth your time anyway. The second method generally ends up with the article site ranking for your article and keyword, rather than your website. Leave the articles on your website where they’ll do the most good by increasing the amount of information available to your visitors.

Briefly, let’s also touch on article marketing software. The sales hype for this software says you can submit 100s of articles to over 50 different sites in a short amount of time. It’s true; you can. However, there is no specific way to submit an article that crosses all article sites. Some require a little bit of coding knowledge to get the article looking right, such as paragraph and heading marks. Because of this, you have no idea what the article will look like until it’s live. Often, it’s an absolute mess.

Article Marketing The Right Way
If you’re going to spend the time, you might as well do it right, right?

1. Selectively choose ten article sites that look like they might get high traffic.
2. Write an article on your chosen topic for each site.
3. Submit one article per site, with a call to action in the bio box.
4. Watch your traffic statistics over the next month or so to see which sites bring you the most traffic.

a) If none bring you traffic, build another list of ten.

b) If you get traffic, narrow the list down to the top five traffic providers.

While watching your traffic…
Instead of waiting to gather information, go ahead and write another ten articles, as well as build your second list of chosen sites. This way, you’ll be ready for either eventuality. If you have five sites that bring you good traffic numbers, submit two articles to each of the five and so on. It may take you a few tries to get that top five, but your traffic will rise once you get them. The rest is then up to your website, content and product/services.

Directory Submissions
Directory submissions work something like this:

1. Submit your website to a directory with key terms
2. People find your link with said key terms
3. Traffic comes to your site.

Again, it’s a little more complicated than that.

With any directory submission, there are two key points to remember: themed directories and Page Rank. Now, Page Rank doesn’t seem to mean much anymore, but a directory with a strong PR provides better basis for link building than one without.

As with article submissions, let’s touch on submission software. Submission software works like so:

1. You get (or choose) a list of directories
2. You put in your meta information (URL, page title, keywords, description)
3. You push enter, start or go

Yes, it’s easy. However, you aren’t just looking for links. You’re looking for quality links. Directory submission software does not distinguish between the two.

Directory Submissions, The Right Way
When submitting to directories for link building purposes, go to directories that have a PR of 3 or above. You can use a program like SEO Quake (plug in for Mozilla Firefox) to get an idea of the PageRank. Now, here’s the catch. Find the most relevant area for your services and check the PR.

See, most directories will have a PageRank of 3 or above on the home page, unless they’re a new directory. What many don’t have, however, is any kind of PR on the pages where your actual link will be, and that’s what you need. Why is this so important if PR doesn’t matter anymore? Because it’s still positive link juice.

Added Jan, 6, 2010: We came across a wonderful blog post at the DailySEOTip http://dailyseotip.com/google-pagerank-how-much-have-things-changed/491/ with an explanation of how PageRank works when pointed at your website. The information is a great addendum to our own post, and one we strongly encourage you to read!

The largest part of SEO is finding relevance: relevance in content and relevance in linking sites. Keep your directory submissions as relevant to your site as possible. Instead of a section called “Business”, delve down until you find something that matches your services or products, such as “Category: Business, Sub-category: Internet, Sub-category: Website Design”.

A final note on directory submissions: the number of directories with a PR on interior pages is relatively low unless you pay for it. Set a reasonable budget to put into your link building. Some sites may cost $2.00 for submissions while places like Yahoo! Directory costs around $300.00. If you’re careful about the places you approach, however, the results – in traffic – are well worth the cost.

Added March, 10, 2010: What are some effective techniques for building links? By Matt Cutts